What Dreams May Come
by AVAAntares
Summary: Alien parasites are preying on Cardiff's citizens. Someone from Jack's past has come from the future to confront him on Earth. Worst of all, Jack himself has been taken by the rift, and Ianto and Gwen must rely on the most unlikely of allies to keep Torchwood running without him. Meanwhile, when the Doctor brings Jack back to Cardiff, things are not at all as they should be...
1. Chapter 1

Author's Note: Because FFN's labeling system is... *ahem* lacking in precision, it should be noted that this is technically a crossover, but it is primarily a _Torchwood_ story that incorporates some characters and creatures from _Doctor Who_. If you are familiar with _Torchwood_ but not _Doctor Who_, don't worry; the story will still make sense.

* * *

To die, to sleep—  
No more—and by a sleep to say we end  
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks  
That flesh is heir to. 'tis a consummation  
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep—  
To sleep—perchance to dream. Ay, there's the rub!  
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,  
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,  
Must give us pause—there's the respect  
That makes calamity of so long life.

— Hamlet, Act III, scene 1.

* * *

"That," Captain Jack Harkness declared emphatically, "is _disgusting_."

They were huddled in the empty lot behind an all-night diner, where an overnight busboy had stumbled—literally—onto a corpse near the rubbish bins. The location had coincided with a surge of rift activity, so Jack had called his team in two hours early. Torchwood had taken control of the scene within minutes of the police's arrival.

It was immediately evident that this wasn't an ordinary corpse. While the rest of the body was still in the very early stages of decay, the face was distorted, pale and bloated as though it had been submerged in water for weeks.

"I've never seen anything like it." Gwen Cooper swept the beam of her torch over the ground. "There seems to be a lot of sand around here. And all these weird bits of metal hardware. Where do you suppose those came from?"

Jack knelt beside the body, snapping on a pair of nitrile gloves. "Gwen, light over here, please. Ianto, anything I should be aware of before I poke it?"

"It's saturated with rift energy," Ianto Jones confirmed, glancing from the handheld scanner to his PDA. "Nothing radioactive, nothing else obviously amiss. But from these readings, it definitely came through the rift."

"Shouldn't we be saying 'he,' rather than 'it'?" Gwen looked as though she were doing her best not to vomit. "After all, he is human, isn't he?" She pointed to the Red Dragons logo on his shirt. "He's even a Wrexham fan."

"We'll see," Jack murmured, gingerly grasping the man's forehead to rock his head back and forth. He made a noise of disgust in his throat. "It's _sloshy_."

Gwen shuddered. "What does 'sloshy' mean, in medical terms?"

"I don't do medical terms. But it feels like his brain has been replaced with some kind of liquid."

"Well, it looks as though he's been underwater," Ianto offered. "Perhaps he drowned?"

"I don't think that would cause this." Jack made a face and palpated around the man's head and throat. "No obvious skull damage that I can feel, though. Just what looks like a puncture at the temple, and some marks below the ear. Maybe a hole from a large needle, and some sort of restraint to hold the head in place?" He shrugged. "We'd need a doctor to open him up to know exactly what happened."

"If only we had one," Gwen sighed.

Jack sat back on his heels and glanced up at her. "I know, Gwen. But I'm not making a cattle call for recruitment. Even if I did, there wouldn't be anyone as good as Owen."

She frowned stubbornly. "I miss them too, Jack, more than I can say. But sooner or later one of us is going to get hurt, and we'll need someone who knows more about specialized alien medicine than whoever's on duty at the A&E. And Ianto's good with tech, but he shouldn't have to cover that, too. We're stretched thin enough as it is."

"For now," Ianto interrupted the recurring argument, "let's just hope that whatever liquefied our Wrexham friend's brain isn't still around." He swept the scanner in a slow arc to cover the surrounding area. "Oh, hello. Another rift energy signature."

Jack stood and stripped off the gloves. "Stationary? Moving?"

Ianto moved the scanner in a large circle. "Stationary. Low to the ground. Possibly another body?"

"Or a creature lying in wait." Jack drew his Webley. "Ianto, stay here and keep scanning. Tell me if anything moves. Gwen, back me up."

Gwen drew her semiautomatic and took a place off to the side of Jack's point position, bracing her torch against the firearm and aiming it in the direction Ianto had indicated. They crept toward the weedy scrub that had sprung up in the space between the diner's back door and the empty lot behind it. Jack was only two steps into the brush when he halted abruptly, staring at the ground.

"Found it," he called. "Gwen, bring the light over here."

They joined him and stared at the second body, lying face-down in the weeds. Unlike the man in the Dragons shirt, this man's clothing was faded with age, and his body was shriveled and emaciated. Skeletal joints were visible through tears in the brittle remains of his shirt. A fine coating of sand seemed embedded in his flesh.

"Think he's in the same condition as our friend over there?" Jack ventured, prodding the body tentatively with the toe of his boot.

"One way to find out," Ianto muttered. He tucked the scanner into the pocket of his coat, then slipped on a pair of gloves before stepping over the body and kneeling beside it.

Jack followed his lead and crouched by the body's other shoulder. "Ready?"

Ianto took a deep breath and held it, then nodded. At the signal, he pushed and Jack pulled, and the body flopped gracelessly onto its back.

An instant later Gwen screeched, Ianto flung himself backward, and even Jack recoiled with a gasp.

"Well," Jack panted when they'd had a moment to recover. "I think we know what happened to our Dragons fan."

* * *

The door chime tore Jamiya's attention away from the album she was perusing. She turned to tap the intercom panel on the wall beside her. "Yes?"

"Special delivery," intoned a familiar voice. "Flowers for… let me see… oh, yes, the tag just says 'to the best lady in the Delta-Four quadrant.' I could only assume…"

Leaving the album on the table, Jamiya went to the door and flung it open. A cluster of exotic off-world flowers greeted her, their pungent scent wafting in with the breeze from the door. Over the top of the blooms peeked the sandy hair and mirthful eyes of her guest. "Yolan!" she laughed. "You shouldn't have!"

"Probably not, but I did anyway," Yolan said, stepping inside. "Happy birthday—though they were almost belated. I was afraid they'd wilt before I found where you'd gone." He ducked around the flowers to kiss her cheek.

"I'm sorry about that! I didn't know how to reach you to tell you I'd moved. I registered for half a year of address forwarding, but then, I never know when you'll be dropping by." She took the bouquet from him. "Do these go in water?"

"Milk solution, if you've got it. Or anything with protein. They're carnivorous. Grow on decaying corpses, mostly." Yolan stripped off his battered jacket, revealing a none-too-clean vest beneath, and mopped his brow with the ragged end of a sleeve. "Phew! You'd think with all the technology this planet has, they could do something about the climate."

"The heat is good for the crops." Jamiya cracked open a tin of condensed meat and tipped some of the broth into a vase. "Would you like something cold to drink?"

"Always. And make it a double."

Jamiya finished with the flowers, and a minute later brought two glasses of something pale yellow to the table. "Spiked, not straight. I can't afford your alcohol habit."

Yolan drained half his glass, then frowned at her over the rim. "Hey, do you mean that? How are you fixed for money?"

"Oh, I'm just teasing. Don't worry, I have plenty of work. There's always a demand for generator engineers here." She sipped from her own glass and made a face. "Oh, that's a bit strong, isn't it?"

Yolan took another gulp. "Not to me, but then, I'm used to something with a bit more kick."

She gave him a stern motherly look. "You should cut back on that. I'd hate to have to send you to rehab."

"Already been. Didn't take." Yolan wiped his mouth, then leaned across the table to retrieve the album she'd been looking at. "Is this… Oh. Oh, my. Look at that." He chuckled as he paged through the album's screen displays. "What a scrappy little boy he was. And those squinty eyes!"

"Every child has squinty eyes, here. It's the sun." She leaned closer to look at the pictures with him. "Look, there's the whole family together. Not many of those." She smiled sadly. "We always said we were going to get a proper family portrait, but we never got around to it, and then…" She fell silent.

Yolan tried to page on, but that picture marked the end of the album. "Nothing from later? Nothing when he's older?"

Jamiya shook her head. "Not once they were gone. Things were hard for us for a long time, and it just… never seemed right. And then he left home the day he was old enough to enlist, so there wasn't much opportunity after that." She sighed. "The only picture I have of him older is the one from that advertising campaign—you know the one?"

Yolan gave a snort. "Do I. He wouldn't shut up about it when the agency chose him as a poster boy. Even had a copy of the advert hanging in his quarters, if you can believe it."

"Oh, I can. He always was fond of his own face." She turned thoughtful. "I wonder what he looks like now. How old is he now? I mean—then. The last time you saw him."

Yolan studied the condensation rings his glass was leaving on the table. "Oh, he looks about my age. Still gorgeous, though. He's aged well."

"You know, I can hardly even imagine him grown up." Jamiya's gaze had dropped again to the image in the album, the family of four clustered together in front of a bleak landscape. "I never really knew him as anything but a child." A moment passed, and then she shook her head. "Sorry, I'm just feeling nostalgic today. I suppose birthdays do that, make you look back and think about things. Normally it doesn't bother me, but… sometimes it's hard not to think about… what might have been." Her fingers brushed the smallest figure in the picture. "How things might have been different. How _he_ might have grown up. What he might have looked like."

Yolan considered her in silence, then reached over to touch her hand. "Jamiya, there was a reason I came to see you."

"Oh? Not just because it was my birthday?"

He tilted his head in acknowledgment. "Well, that determined _which_ day I came to see you. But I wanted to come anyway. There's…" He hesitated, conflict tightening his face. "There's something I need to tell you, and I'm not really sure how to say it."

Jamiya's face drained of color. "Oh, no," she breathed. "He's not…? Is he dead, Yolan?"

"What? No! No, he's alive. He's very much alive."

She sagged in relief, then brightened. "Does that mean you've seen him recently, then?"

Yolan nodded. "Yeah, I've seen him. Spent a few days with him, in fact." He shifted in his seat and flinched. "Still got the bruises."

"I'm so glad," she sighed, then shook her head. "Not about the bruises. I mean…"

"Yeah, I get it." Yolan's mouth quirked in a half-grin. "Don't worry, I deserved what I got. He wasn't happy to see me, and I can't really blame him."

"I just wish _I_ could see him again. Things were so strained between us when he left, and I wish… I don't suppose you could convince him to come home for a visit?"

"Not much chance of that, I'm afraid." Yolan braced his arms on the table. "But for once, he's not what I wanted to talk to you about."

"That's a first. Usually, he's all we _ever_ talk about." Jamiya frowned as she examined his face. "What is it, Yolan? I don't think I've ever seen you look so serious."

Yolan sighed and skimmed the album back a few pages, to a picture of two young boys playing in the sand. "It's about your other son."


	2. Chapter 2

"This isn't fair, Jack!" Martha Jones shouted toward the top of the stairs.

Jack appeared at the railing and looked down into the autopsy bay, where Martha was standing between the two bodies they'd retrieved from the diner. Jack and Ianto had wrangled them into the SUV, careful not to touch the hideous alien creature still attached to the second body's face, and laid them out on the tables before Martha's arrival. "Well, I'm sure our friend there didn't ask for his face to be eaten off by a…" He turned and called over his shoulder. "Ianto, what was that thing in the _Aliens_ film you showed me?"

"A xenomorph. And it's _Alien_, singular." Ianto appeared at Jack's side and peered down into the bay. "But it's the wrong shape. The facehuggers in the movie had a…"

"I meant it's not fair to _me_," Martha cut in. "You know I have a full-time job at UNIT, with a lot of responsibilities I'm currently shirking just so I can plunge my scalpel into some body you found behind a dive bar."

"Café," Ianto corrected.

"Whatever. My point is, I can't always be running back and forth between Cardiff and London just because you're too stubborn to put another doctor on staff!"

Jack frowned. "I've been looking, but I haven't found any good candidates. Cardiff isn't exactly the shining, progressive epicenter of the medical world. It's barely even a _city_."

"Oi! I heard that!" Gwen shouted from across the Hub.

Jack rolled his eyes. "Fine, it's a _small_ city. But this is Torchwood. We can't just recruit some friendly neighborhood pediatrician and tell him, 'Hey, aliens are real, and here are some bodies that have had their brains liquefied by them, and by the way, the alien is still _munching on _one of them, can you dissect it for us?"

"Well, you're going to have to sort it," sighed Martha. "I can't do this anymore. After the thing with the Daleks, UNIT assigned me to oversee another whole project, and I'm barely staying afloat with the workload there. Plus, I'm trying to plan a wedding, and at least _one_ of you lot knows what that's like."

"Sympathies," Gwen called.

"Appreciated," Martha called back. She shot a look at Jack. "I'll do this one, but it's the last time you call me out here for anything less than the world _actually ending_, okay?"

Jack sighed. "Fine. Just tell me what's eating our dead guy."

Martha turned to the table and snapped on a pair of gloves. "Well, for starters, you all fail basic first aid. Because our guy _isn__'t dead_."

"What?" After a frozen instant, Jack bolted down the stairs, Ianto in his wake. "What do you mean, he isn't dead?"

Martha rolled her eyes and seized Jack's hand, placing his fingers firmly over the pulse point inside the body's wrist. For several seconds he felt nothing; then there was a faint tick of pressure, so soft it could barely be perceived. "He has a heartbeat. Feel it now?"

"But it's so slow, and weak," Jack protested. "You can't blame me for missing that. Especially when he looks the way he does."

Martha picked up a chart and made some notations. "I'm clocking his pulse at around twenty-two. That means it's probably ventricular, and whatever that creature is doing to him is interfering with the signals from the sinoatrial node…" She glanced over at the blank faces of her listeners and sighed. "Okay, look, the heart has a kind of natural pacemaker in it. In a healthy adult, it normally tells the heart to beat, say, sixty times per minute, yeah?" The men nodded their understanding. "But if something goes wrong—for example, if the electrical signals are blocked—the heart has a couple of backup systems so it doesn't suddenly stop beating. But the backups can't tell the heart to beat as fast. When that happens, the patient usually has trouble breathing, or goes unconscious."

"So it's basically like emergency lighting?" Ianto asked. "You can still see, but it's not as bright as when the power's on?"

"Um." Martha blinked. "I never thought of it that way, but I guess you're more or less on the right track."

"So what could be causing that?" Jack nodded toward the body. It was unsettling to know that beneath the flesh of the gnarled creature clinging to his face, there was still a living human being.

"Could be neurological, could be electrical. I mean, it's alien, so it could be telekinetic for all we know." She sighed and clicked on her audio recording device. "Report of Dr. Martha Jones, who has been dragged to Cardiff against her will to examine Jack's latest paramour…"

"Oi!" Ianto put in.

Martha flashed him an apologetic grin. "Sorry, Ianto. Anyway, to all appearances, we're looking at an adult human male with an alien attached to his face. Estimated age is between… thirty and sixty? It's difficult to say without more comprehensive examination. Severely emaciated, visible muscle loss… deeply tanned, lots of blistering and sun damage to the skin. Ethnicity unknown, but most likely Caucasian; the skin on the underside of his arms is much lighter, suggesting he was lying on his back in the sun for an extended period of time. His clothing is in tatters, and apparently provided little protection. Hair…" She sampled it between her fingers. "Light brown to medium blond, very brittle, possibly bleached or highlighted. Physical condition suggests long-term malnutrition. No visible scars or tattoos, no identification or personal effects. Clothing was most likely made of natural fiber, which has decayed or been eaten away." Martha tugged at a remaining scrap of fabric, which disintegrated in her hands, exposing the rest of the man's wasted physique.

Across the table, Ianto was frowning down at the victim. "Is it just me, or…"

"There's something familiar about him?" Jack finished, sweeping his eyes over the body. "Yeah, I got this weird flash of that for a second, too."

Martha followed the direction of Jack's gaze and cleared her throat loudly. "Captain Harkness wishes to note the evidence that the victim was not born to practicing Jewish parents," she said pointedly. Jack gave a guilty start and moved his focus away from the man's exposed groin, dodging a ballistic eyeroll from Ianto.

Martha retrieved a probe from a nearby tray and went on with her report. "Now, as for the alien… Mottled green and tan in color; rigid carapace of some kind; heavily textured, with a deep groove right across the center. Laterally symmetrical, but the lower end is tapered to a point. It appears to have… Legs? Tentacles? Some sort of protrusions grasping the man's neck below the jaw. The upper part of the alien's—I guess I'll call it a shell—extends over the entire face and top of the head." She bent closer and moved the probe toward one of the tiny clawed limbs. "If I try to pry its grip loose… Oh!" She jumped back. "It didn't like that. It just dug in harder."

She spent a few more minutes tapping the shell at various points and noting the results, then switched off the recorder. "Well, the alien is definitely still active, and every time I touch it, it digs deeper into his neck. I'm not sure how to get it off him without causing more damage."

"But judging by what happened to the other victim, it's just going to kill him anyway, right?" Jack crossed his arms. "What if we just shoot it?"

Martha's jaw dropped. "Jack, it's attached to the man's _head_! Shooting it would kill him, too!"

"He's going to die anyway!"

"So we shouldn't even try to save him?" She ripped off her gloves and slammed them into the bin with ferocity. "Honestly, Jack, sometimes I think you never learned a damned thing from all your time with the Doctor. Your default solution always involves guns."

Jack bristled. "Well, if you can just _think happy thoughts_ and get this thing off him, be my guest."

"Oh, right, because your techniques would have been _just dandy_ in that situation," she snapped. "What happened to that weapon I brought aboard the _Valiant_, again?"

"I don't know; my memory's a little fuzzy from being _systematically tortured _for a year!"

"_Enough!_" Ianto shouted, startling them both into quiet. "If you two can stop behaving like five-year-olds, we have a dying man on the table with an alien crustacean melting his brain. Martha's train leaves in just over an hour, and I already have one corpse to dispose of. I'd rather not make it two. Could we please focus?"

The shocked silence that followed was broken by slow applause from above them. They turned to see Gwen leaning over the railing, clapping. "Ianto beat me to it, but I was about to say something similar."

The tension remained in Jack's posture as he climbed the stairs. "Sort it out amongst yourselves," he muttered. "I'll be in my office."

When he had gone, Martha blew out a breath. "Sorry. I just… I've been under a lot of stress, with UNIT, and the wedding, and my family… I guess it's put me on edge."

Gwen appeared at her side and rubbed her shoulder sympathetically. "We all have. Jack, too. He really doesn't want to replace Tosh and Owen, so he's trying to pick up all the slack himself. It's wearing him out, and his fuse has been shorter than usual these past few weeks."

Martha nodded. "I get that. But even so, I _hate_ the way he always leaps to the worst possible solution. How can he jump straight to killing someone, without even trying to save them?"

"It may not be the worst solution," Ianto said quietly, eyes sweeping the ruined body on the table. "Being kept just on the edge of life can be far worse than death."

Gwen circled the table to squeeze his arm. "Ianto, if this is bringing back bad memories, you don't have to be here. I can help Martha."

Ianto flashed her a tight smile, but shook his head. "No, I'm fine. I'd like to help." He tentatively touched the man's limp hand. "There's something about him… I'd like to see him survive this, if possible."

Martha gave him a curious look, then picked up her chart again. "The hour I have left is not enough time to run all the tests we'd need to determine exactly how this thing is affecting him, but I can at least give you a list and a head start on some chemical analysis. Then, when and if Jack approves a new doctor coming on, you'll at least have the data you need."

Ianto nodded. "That's the most we can ask of you. Let's get started."

* * *

Ianto found Jack at his desk, bent diligently over a pile of reports he'd been putting off for the past week. He took a moment to consider their fearless leader's furrowed brow and hunched shoulders before waving the clipboard to get his attention. "Jack? I've put the corpse in the morgue, and I have the preliminary results on our living victim. The rest of the tests won't be finished for a few hours, but Martha left me instructions, so I think I can have the basic data for you by tomorrow."

Jack's attention snagged on two words. "Martha left?"

Ianto nodded. "Just a few minutes ago."

Jack sank back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. "Damn."

"Sir?"

"I wanted to talk to her before she left," Jack sighed. "Clear the air. Apologize." He let his hand fall back to the desk. "What I said to her was pretty awful."

Ianto didn't know the particulars of what had happened to Jack and Martha during their time away with the Doctor, but he knew Jack, and if Jack felt guilty enough to want to apologize, it must have been awful indeed. He glanced at his watch. "Well, if you hurry, you can still catch her at the station. Her train doesn't leave for ten minutes."

Jack frowned. "Isn't that a little, you know, melodramatic? Chasing down her train to say goodbye?"

Ianto shrugged. "Perhaps, but at least she'll know you're sincere about apologizing."

Jack hesitated only a moment before bolting from his seat and grabbing his greatcoat. "Keys?"

Ianto tossed him the SUV's keyring. "Just filled the tank. Try not to run down any civilians."

A moment after Jack slammed through the door that connected to the garage, Gwen appeared in the door to the office. "What's the emergency? Did I miss a rift alert?"

Ianto shook his head and began straightening the mess on Jack's desk. "He wanted to catch Martha before she left."

"So what are we to do while he's gone?"

"Carry on as we were, I suppose. How's the thing with the giant spider coming along?"

Gwen shuddered. "It's over, I think. I planted a report that someone had lost a pet tarantula, and somehow convinced Mrs. Cavendish that fear made her imagine it bigger than it really was."

"And the spider?"

"Managed to trap it in one of those pet travel kennels. It's down in the vaults." She fished a scrap of paper out of her pocket. "Here's the receipt, for expenses. I had to buy the one for large breed dogs. Sixty pound for a plastic box, can you believe?"

Ianto took it from her and added it to the stack of papers on his clipboard. "Thanks. I'll see you're reimbursed."

Gwen nodded at the other reports on the clipboard. "So what's the word on our alien facehugger?" She glanced hopefully at Ianto. "That's the right name, isn't it? I haven't seen any of the _Alien _films."

"What?" Ianto gaped at her. "Gwen, how can you work for Torchwood and yet not have seen one of the greatest science-fiction franchises of all time?"

"Probably because I see enough _real_ aliens in the average workday!" she laughed. "The fake ones just look… fake."

"Not in _Alien_, they don't." He nodded, settling something in his mind. "All right. Tomorrow night, rift permitting, I'll bring over my DVD set and show it to you. Tell Rhys to make popcorn."

Gwen raised an eyebrow. "Tomorrow's Friday. Isn't that usually your date night with Jack?"

"Oh, right." Ianto performed some mental calculations. "Tuesday, then, after the conference call…"

Before Gwen could reply, a shrill alarm sounded through the Hub. Ianto dropped the clipboard on Jack's desk, and together they ran to what had been Toshiko's workstation. "What kind of alert is that?" Gwen asked, plugging her ears against the klaxon.

Ianto pulled up the security system interface. "Some kind of temporal incursion. Very localized. For some reason, Tosh had this particular energy signature flagged as highly dangerous."

Gwen moved to her desk and collected her pistol, which she hadn't bothered to stow after their early-morning call. "Where is it?"

"Directly above us." Ianto glanced at the invisible lift, which was currently at Hub level. "And I mean _directly_. It's concentrated right over the paving slab the lift replaces."

"It's never a good sign when they come to us," Gwen muttered. "Right. We go out the tourist office. I'll circle up by the opera house, you go along the other side by the shops, and we'll put the water tower between us. At least that way, we'll have whatever it is surrounded."

"Your definition of 'surrounded' leaves something to be desired," Ianto said as he collected his own weapon from the armory, "but as it's the only plan we have, let's go."

Moments later, as his feet pounded over the boardwalk, Ianto hooked his comm unit over his ear and activated it. He begged silently for a fast answer, and was grateful when Jack's voice trilled in his ear after only a few seconds. "I got the alert. What's going on?"

"Temporal incursion," Ianto panted. He veered to the left, taking the steps to street level. "On the Plass, right above the Hub. Checking it out now."

"You okay? You sound winded."

"Just a bit… out of shape." He flew past the pub and the hotel, his legs burning with exertion, and changed his course again to curve toward the water tower. "Been too busy… to go to the gym."

He slowed as he reached the bench at the base of the water tower. The fountain blocked his view of the lift slab, but just before he'd slipped behind it, he'd had a glimpse of Gwen on the opposite side. Face blanched, arms rigid, her posture had been one of extreme fear or anger. She'd been aiming her pistol at the water tower. Controlling his breathing, Ianto drew his own sidearm and stepped around the water tower to back her up.

From Gwen's attitude, he'd been anticipating an alien, perhaps some kind of frightening, hideous monster. The figure he saw could certainly be called a monster—though not the kind he'd expected.

Ianto struggled to keep his finger off the trigger as the fury bled through him. Presently the roar in his ears subsided enough for him to hear Jack's increasingly frantic demands for an update on the situation.

Ianto's heart was pounding from the sprint up the hill and the surge of adrenaline, but he steadied his voice as best as he was able. "Jack, you need to get back here. _Now._"


	3. Chapter 3

There were two reasons Captain John Hart was still breathing: First, he'd put both hands well into the air and kept them there from the moment he'd warped into this time and place. Gwen Cooper could be merciless when the situation demanded it, but she did not kill in cold blood, and Ianto Jones rarely fired the first shot in any conflict.

Second, he wasn't alone.

The middle-aged woman standing near him was gazing around the Plass, seemingly disoriented. When she saw the guns pointed at her she tensed and actually drew a step _closer_ to Hart, as though he could somehow protect her. In reality, it seemed more like he was using her as cover from the two Torchwood agents pinning him down.

"Now, I know you're not happy to see me," Hart drawled, "but I promise I'm here for entirely altruistic reasons. So how about you don't shoot me, and I…"

"Shut up!" shouted Gwen, stepping closer and switching her aim from Hart's chest to his head. She flicked an instant's glance at Ianto, asking for some kind of guidance, and Ianto realized she didn't have her comm in. But Jack hadn't issued any orders. He hadn't even asked for particulars; he'd simply swung the SUV in a hard turn (Ianto had heard the squealing of the tires over the earpiece) and told Ianto he'd be there in two minutes. Less, if Ianto knew Jack's driving.

Ianto didn't trust himself to speak, so he nodded to Gwen to take the lead. Judging by her white face and trembling lips, she was in no better emotional state than he was, but she'd always been more of a talker. "You have some nerve, coming back here after what you did," she hissed. "Give me one reason why I shouldn't end you right now."

The woman with Hart looked perplexed and turned a questioning look on him, but Hart himself simply rolled his eyes. "Did you forget about the part where I was acting under coercion, in fear for my life? And I helped save your boss, remember?"

"You helped that monster kill Tosh!" Gwen screamed. Even at this distance, Ianto could see her finger twitch closer to the trigger, her discipline eroding in the face of overwhelming hatred. "And Owen! And dozens of innocent people!" There were tears on her cheeks, and he wondered if letting her take over the situation had been the best plan after all.

Hart kept his hands in the air, but sighed. "Look, I'll admit the way all that went down was… regrettable. But I've got someone here that Jackie-boy is probably going to want to see, so let's postpone the violence at least until he gets here, okay?"

Gwen's eyes flicked to the unknown woman, and with an effort, she lowered her pistol to the level of his kneecaps—not the ground, but at least no longer at his head. "You bastard," she hissed.

The woman spoke for the first time. She glanced from Gwen to Hart and uttered a rapid string of syllables unlike any language Ianto had heard before, peppered with broad vowels and hard consonants. It was complete gibberish to him, but the tone and cadence reminded him incongruously of Jack's faux-American accent.

Hart's face softened as he replied to her in the same language, and one of his raised hands gestured vaguely toward Gwen as he seemed to explain something. The frown didn't leave the woman's face, and deepened as she looked from Gwen to Ianto. She turned and took a step toward Ianto, tentatively spreading her hands to show they were empty, and spoke to him.

"She'd like you to stop pointing a gun in our faces, Eye Candy," Hart translated.

Ianto desired nothing more than to put his gun _through _Hart's face, but this woman had shown only discomfort, not hostility, in the face of their weapons. He slowly pointed his pistol at the pavement, and the woman nodded gratefully.

An instant later there was a shriek of tires on wet pavement, and before Hart could fully turn to register what was happening behind him, a gray-coated typhoon had landed a blow so hard he was flung backward into the water tower. Hart flailed midair for an instant before falling across the drain at the base of the sculpture.

Jack swept Hart up by the lapels, smashing him bodily against the fountain with no regard for the water that cascaded over both of them. "What," he hissed through clenched teeth, "the _hell—_" he punctuated the word by slamming Hart's shoulders into the sculpture, "—do you think—" Hart's skull bounced off the metal, "—you are doing on my planet?"

The blows to his head appeared to have stunned Hart speechless for a moment, but then the woman stepped forward and said something that caused Jack to freeze. "_Javic!_" she cried. "_Kosi ty Javic doari nen?_"

Hart's jacket slipped from Jack's fingers, and he turned slowly toward the woman, face pale and eyes stretched wide in a look of utter shock that Ianto had never seen on his face. His lips moved soundlessly a few times before he whispered, "_Matkal? Aki ty sumar ge?_"

Ianto already knew that Jack was an accomplished polyglot. He'd often joked that he spoke as many tongues as he'd tasted—a remark which Ianto, knowing Jack as he did, was fully prepared to take at face value. Not only was Jack fluent in several Earth languages, but he was equally proficient in a number of alien dialects, which he'd used on occasion to negotiate with extraterrestrial visitors. But though he'd heard Jack speak everything from Russian to Bathirian, never had Ianto heard _any _foreign words flow as effortlessly from Jack's tongue as these did. This was not a language Jack had merely picked up in his travels, but one he knew intimately, one that seemed to fit his voice and his speech patterns even better than English.

Jack and the woman exchanged a few more hushed phrases before she reached up to embrace him—briefly, because Jack was soaking wet and John Hart was groaning at his feet, but with obvious longing and affection.

Ianto was unwillingly reminded of Estelle, of the antique photos he'd once found in Jack's desk drawer, of the long, long history and many lovers who had preceded him. Was this woman another old flame of Jack's?

It was Gwen who rescued them all from the uncomfortable situation, holstering her sidearm and suggesting that they continue the drama inside the Hub, where tourists were less likely to be frightened by their fistfights and pistols. Jack numbly agreed, and Gwen deftly cuffed Hart's hands behind his back. "We'll meet you downstairs," she told Jack, propelling her detainee toward the tourist office and leaving Jack and the woman to take the invisible lift.

Ianto followed in Gwen's wake, trying to understand it all and afraid that when he did, it would actually make sense.

* * *

By the time Ianto and Gwen marched John Hart in through the cog door, Jack had vanished. The woman was standing alone near the sofa, glancing curiously about the Hub interior. When she saw them coming through the cage doors, she flashed them a tight smile, but said nothing, though her eyes followed Hart with obvious concern.

Jack's breach of protocol was one more anomaly Ianto struggled to make sense of. They never left visitors to the Hub unattended—Jack's explicit orders, as well as common sense—and the fact that Jack was nowhere to be seen worried him.

Gwen hauled Hart to the edge of the medical bay and released one of his hands from the cuffs just long enough to loop the chain around the metal railing before re-cuffing him. Hart was still wobbling a bit on his feet, but he had recovered enough to roll his eyes. "If I wanted to do any harm, gorgeous, I wouldn't have rung the doorbell."

"Shut up," Gwen snapped.

"Or what? You'll make me?" Hart's eyes roved over Gwen speculatively. "Though that could be fun, too…"

Ianto was trying to decide whether they really needed Hart conscious when Jack reappeared, jogging up the steps that led to the lower levels with one of Ianto's archive boxes in his hand. He glanced fleetingly at Hart, then made a straight line for the woman. He said something in the other language; she held out her hand, and Jack strapped a small device onto her wrist. Ianto recognized it as an item they'd taken off a dead Vowlet a few months before, which he'd filed with the other scavenged alien technology in the archives.

Jack pressed some buttons on his wrist strap, then activated the new device, which emitted a shrill chirp. "There, that should help," he said. "Can you understand me?"

The woman brightened. "Yes! It seems to be working." She cocked her head to one side. "Oh, that sounds strange. Like an echo of my own voice in my head."

"Universal translator. The interface takes some getting used to."

The woman's eyes flicked back toward John Hart. "Javic, I know you two don't get along anymore, but is it really necessary to restrain Yolan like that?"

Surprise registered in Jack's face. "You actually know him?"

"Of course! He's been coming to visit me for years." She frowned. "I thought you knew. He said you worked together."

"We used to, but that was a long, long time ago." Jack shook his head. "And I go by Jack, now."

"Jack." She tested the name. "Is that a nickname?"

"More like another identity. And Yolan," he continued, steering her toward the others, "was going by the name John Hart, last we met. Unless you've picked up a new one in the meantime?"

Hart shrugged. "No need. There's no Time Agency anymore, no reason to follow mission protocol."

Jack pointed out his team. "This is Gwen Cooper, and Ianto Jones. They work for me."

The woman nodded politely, though there was still wariness in her eyes. "Hello."

"And this is Jamiya Thane," Jack told them, resting a hand on her shoulder.

"Nice to meet you," Gwen returned, not concealing her curiosity. "You… know Jack from… er, before?"

Jamiya smiled. "I think it's safe to say I knew him before anyone else did."

Jack took a deep breath and glanced between the members of his team. "Ianto, Gwen… I'd like you to meet my mother."


	4. Chapter 4

Ianto's hands were steady as he set down the mug, though internally he was quaking with nervous energy. "I made coffee, if you'd like some."

Jamiya Thane looked up from her seat at the conference table, where she'd been installed while Jack verified that John Hart's arrival had not triggered any problems with the rift, and smiled politely. "Thank you, that's very kind." She pulled the mug closer and blinked at the fluid within. "Oh, it's… this is coffee?"

Ianto quashed the tiny flutter of panic that flapped beneath his lungs. "Do you have coffee, where you're from? I can make you something else if you'd prefer."

"No, no, I wouldn't want to put you to any trouble. I'm sure this is fine. It's just that it looks different. Coffee where I'm from is more of an amber color." She took a sip and did her best to disguise a grimace. "And a little sweeter."

Ianto hastily transferred two small containers from his tray to the conference table. "Try some milk and sugar. You can sweeten it to taste."

"Thank you." She added two heaping spoonfuls of sugar to the mug, and Ianto was reminded of the way Jack sometimes took his coffee when he was feeling tired or depressed. Ianto had always assumed it was for a quick energy boost, but now he wondered if Jack had been trying to replicate something he remembered from his home world. Wherever that was. _When_ever that was.

And this woman before him was not only from that same mysterious place and time, but she had brought Jack into the universe. She had raised him, taught him to walk, shaped him into the man he was. She knew so much more about him than Ianto ever would. That alone made her intimidating, even apart from the fact that she was from another planet, thousands of years in the future.

Well, so was Jack, for that matter. But Jack had spent more than a century learning to blend in with local culture before they had met, and Ianto had befriended him long before he learned Jack was from outer space.

As though Jamiya were reading his mind, she suddenly asked, "Have you known Jav—Jack long?" She sampled the coffee again, then examined the milk curiously before adding a dash to the cup.

"Almost three years," he answered promptly. "Earth years, I mean. Do you…?"

Jamiya nodded. "We still use Earth Standard years for the official calendar. Are you close?"

Ianto wondered what Jack's mother would think of their sexual-and-sometimes-romantic relationship. "I like to think we are, yes."

"That's good. I'm glad he has friends here. He was such a lonely child."

"Really?" Jamiya glanced up in surprise at his outburst, and Ianto hastily added, "I mean, he's so… outgoing. People are naturally attracted to him. I just assumed he would have had lots of friends, growing up."

She shook her head. "He had a difficult childhood. And there weren't many others his age. A lot of the children were… sent away."

Jack hadn't told him much about the monsters who had taken his brother, but Ianto could imagine parents hiding their young ones away after such an attack, the way children in London and Cardiff had been shipped off to the country to escape the bombs during the Second World War. "Well, I don't think he's lonely now. We're all close here—me, Jack, Gwen."

"Gwen." Jamiya leaned closer and lowered her voice. "Is she his lover?"

Ianto smothered an ancient flare of jealously. "Absolutely not. Gwen is married. There's nothing like that between her and Jack."

If Jamiya noticed the vehemence of his denial, she didn't show it. "Are there others who work here?"

"Not anymore. We lost our other two operatives a few months ago." He frowned. "Out of curiosity, why do you ask?"

Jamiya shrugged. "It's just that Yolan—John, I mean—told me a while back that he thought Jack was romantically involved with one of his employees, and… well, it's a mother's prerogative to be nosy." She winked, and for an instant her expression was disturbingly similar to Jack's flirting face. "Do you know if he's seeing anyone?"

Ianto couldn't prevent a hot flush from suffusing his cheeks. "Um. Well…"

"Oh," Jamiya breathed slowly. "Oh, I see." She examined him with a new interest. "Have you been together long?"

Ianto preferred to mark the start of their relationship from the day Jack had asked him out on a date, rather than the messy arrangement they'd had in the months before he'd left with the Doctor. "A little over a year."

Jamiya nodded. "And are things serious between you two?"

Just then Jack appeared in the doorway to the conference room, and Ianto could have kissed him for putting an end to the uncomfortably personal line of questioning. Oblivious to the awkward conversation he'd interrupted, Jack was instantly captivated by the mug in his mother's hands. "Is that coffee?" His naturally loud voice boomed in the tight space.

"I'll bring you a fresh cup," Ianto said hastily. He hugged his tray to his chest to squeeze past Jack and hurried out of the room, letting out a sigh of relief once he was safely down the corridor.

He knew there was no rational reason he should feel nervous around Jamiya Thane. It was absurd to so desperately want Jack's mother to _like_ him—it wasn't as though her approval would result in any definite advancement in his relationship with Jack, and he somehow doubted Jack would take advice from anyone regarding his love life, even his mother—but there was a part of him that still hoped she would give them her blessing. Perhaps it would just assure him that what he had with Jack was _right_, somehow.

He hoped she hadn't been too put off by the unfamiliar coffee. It was his best blend, but she hadn't taken more than a few polite sips during their entire conversation. Maybe he could ask Jack what kinds of beverages he should serve her instead.

Ianto deposited his tray on the counter in the kitchenette and paused to rub his temples. A part of him was still reeling from the revelation that Jack even _had _a mother. From the way Jack spoke and acted, Ianto had always imagined him as being alone in the universe, a free spirit with no family ties. But knowing he'd had a home and a family to return to all along derailed several of Ianto's private theories about him.

The sudden appearance of this woman had changed Jack, too; he had been bouncing around her like an excited puppy since her arrival. Ianto wondered if that were Jack's own nerves showing, or if he'd always been a mama's boy. He tried to imagine Jack as a child, but the image refused to manifest in his mind.

Ianto mechanically poured fresh water into the coffee machine. While it heated, he paced the Hub's metal-grid platforms, counting off the tasks remaining on their never-ending to-do list. He had a mountain of backlogged order forms waiting for completion up in the tourist office; Jack had two Ministry phone calls to return and a file from UNIT to review; Gwen was behind on her reports, but at least she had finished with the giant spider-thing. That was likely the _only_ task she would mark off her list for today, as she was spending the afternoon in the vaults, keeping watch on John Hart. She had volunteered to guard him, and Ianto wondered how much that had been motivated by a desire for revenge. After all, Hart had poisoned her, cuffed her to a bomb, and had been indirectly responsible for the deaths of Toshiko and Owen. Gwen was probably hoping Hart would try to escape just so she could have the chance to shoot him.

As Ianto mentally catalogued the day's events, he remembered the tests Martha had begun earlier in the day, and realized he had never finished compiling the results. He descended to the autopsy bay to retrieve them, but instead found himself drawn to the table where the eerie alien and its shriveled victim lay.

"Poor devil. God help you," Ianto murmured, his eyes flicking from the clamlike carapace of the alien to the wasted human body below. As he examined the victim, he once again felt the hair on the back of his neck prickle. There was something about this body… something _almost_ familiar, but just beyond his grasp…

Just then he heard the subtle change in pitch that told him the coffee was ready. He hastily collected the reports and made his way back up to the kitchenette. When Jack's mug was prepared, he placed it on his tray and navigated the maze of tunnels that led to the conference room.

As he approached, he heard raised voices carrying out into the corridor. Ianto slowed, unsure whether to interrupt the conversation.

"But why _him_?" Jack was saying. "Of all the people in the galaxy to trust, you had to pick Yolan? He's a thief and a cold-blooded killer! Not to mention a… a drunk, and…"

"And he's the only reason I've had _any_ word of you for the last fifteen years," Jamiya countered. "Once you left the Time Agency, no one knew where to find you. I didn't even know if you were alive or dead, until Yolan came. He told me about the missions you'd been on together, and kept me informed as best he could about you. And he took care of me, helped me out whenever I needed something. He even remembers my birthday every year. So don't tell me he's an irredeemable scoundrel, because these past few years he's been more of a son to me than you have!"

There was a long silence, and Ianto felt the tension overflowing into the hall. He slowly rocked his weight onto his rear foot, preparing to retreat silently down the passageway until this discussion had played out. Before he could move more than a step, he heard Jack speak again.

"I didn't have a choice." His words were low, almost a growl. "Something happened to me at the Time Agency… I can't explain, because they erased my memory of those years. But I couldn't go home. I couldn't contact you at all, because it would have put you in danger. They would have used you to get to me."

"Do you think I would have cared about the danger, if it meant knowing my son was safe?"

Jack gave a humorless laugh. "Do you think I could bear being responsible for getting _another_ family member killed? Or worse?" His voice turned bitter. "Besides, I wasn't in a good place then. You were better off not knowing what I was up to."

Jamiya sighed, and Ianto used the sound to cover another stealthy footstep. "And are you in a good place now?" she asked softly.

"Pretty good, yeah."

"But you still haven't contacted me."

It was Jack's turn to sigh. "My vortex manipulator burned out. I can't even teleport anymore, much less travel in time. I had no way of reaching you. In the twenty-first century, they haven't even invented the superspace wavelink yet."

"And you couldn't send a message with someone? Yolan told me he's been here twice to visit you. _He _can still travel…"

"The last time Yolan 'visited,' two of my team ended up dead," Jack snapped. "He put my entire city in danger, and he knows he's not welcome here. There's no way in hell I would have sent him to you." There was the sound of a chair scraping the floor, then Jack's heavy footsteps pacing the room. "It wouldn't surprise me if he was just using you as a shield to avoid being shot on arrival, so he can get to me for some reason."

"I think that unlikely," Jamiya scoffed. "He'd have to have been planning this for over a decade."

"Or a couple of weeks," Jack corrected. "He can time travel, remember? He could have visited you, then hopped forward in time the moment he was out of sight and visited you again. How much did he appear to age over those fifteen years?"

Jamiya was silent for a moment, and Ianto caught himself straining his ears for an answer. Shaking his head, he eased another step backward. He really shouldn't be eavesdropping on this private family conversation. He would just slip back down the hall, and…

"He told me about Gray," Jamiya said flatly.

Ianto froze. From the conference room, he heard Jack's sharp hiss of breath. "_What?_" Jack breathed.

"He told me he'd found Gray," she repeated. "He told me he'd brought him to you."

"Did he tell you what Gray did?" Jack's words were clipped.

"No. He only said it ended badly, and I should hear it from you." There was a pause. "Were you ever going to tell me?"

"No," Jack said quietly. "You were better off not knowing."

"What I'm hearing is that you keep deciding what's best for me, without ever taking my feelings on the matter into consideration."

"I was trying to protect you!"

"I'm your mother, Javic. It's my job to protect you, not the other way around."

"You say that now, but if you knew the truth…"

"I _want_ to know. That's what I came here to learn. It's why I asked Yolan to bring me." There was the sound of another chair pushed back, and a rustle of fabric as she moved around the table. "Tell me about Gray. Tell me everything that happened."

"I can't."

"Can't, or won't?"

Jack's voice trembled faintly. "I can't bear to."

Ianto had heard enough—too much, in truth—and he had no wish to listen to Jack recount the story of his brother's vicious acts of revenge, of Toshiko and Owen's deaths. He strode boldly into the room, bearing his coffee tray before him like a shield. "I've brought your coffee, as promised," he said brightly. "And Jack, there's an urgent phone call for you. I've put it through to your office."

Jack flashed him a grateful look and scooped his mug from the tray as he went out. "I'll take it right away. Thanks."

When Jack had gone, Ianto turned to Jamiya. "Can I get you anything else?"

Jamiya didn't reply, but scrutinized him closely. At last she shook her head. "I hope he pays you well."

Ianto took the reprimand gracefully. "He does. More importantly, I don't want to make him relive those memories."

She gave him an appraising look. "Are you prepared to tell me the truth in his place, then?"

Ianto hesitated. There were certain things he didn't have the right to share—Jack's immortality, for one—but perhaps he could give her just enough information about Gray's actions to spare Jack any more questions. He placed his tray on the table. "You might want to sit down."


	5. Chapter 5

Gwen stood in the observation area of the vaults and watched impassively as John Hart bounced off the transparent wall of his cell. He used the rebound to launch himself forward, his weight aligned behind a fist, but Jack pivoted to one side and followed through with a right hook that drove Hart to the floor. Hart coughed and rolled over to spit blood, heaving a few whistling breaths. "I know you like it rough," he managed to wheeze, "but this is taking it to the extreme."

Jack ignored the wisecrack and hauled Hart up by the ragged collar of his military jacket. "You told her," he hissed, slamming Hart against the wall again. "You told her about Gray!"

Hart returned Jack's glare. "She deserved to know what happened to him."

"She deserved to remember him as he was!" Jack shoved Hart away, and the wounded man sank onto the cell's single cot, breathing heavily. "What are you playing at? You come here hiding behind my mother, turn her against me—"

"All I did was tell her the truth." Hart spat more blood-tinged saliva on the concrete floor. "The rest was your own doing. You haven't exactly been the model of a devoted son. You didn't even tell her where you'd gone."

"Because she didn't need to know what I had become. If she learned the truth about me, it would break her heart. Just like she didn't need to know the truth about Gray."

"He's her son!" Hart shoved himself to his feet and faced Jack squarely. "And so were you, once. You have no idea how much she's missed you. How worried she's been."

"And of course you would," sneered Jack, "because you became the perfect son in my place. Oh, you're good, I'll give you that. She was completely taken in by you."

Hart looked affronted—at least to the extent one could, with a bloody nose and a swollen lip. "I was just being kind. Yes, I'll admit, I visited her the first time to pump her for information, but when I saw how lonely she was, I felt sorry for her. I figured if you couldn't be arsed to look in on your own mother from time to time, I'd do it for you." He glanced away. "It was the least I could do, after what happened with Gray."

"Save it," Jack snapped. "I want to know your endgame. What are you after here?"

Hart spread his hands with practiced innocence. "Love and reconciliation?"

Jack's fists clenched. "That sounds like a broken jaw to me."

"_Enough!_" Jamiya's voice cracked through the vaults, startling Gwen. She spun away from the window to see the older woman descending the narrow stairs. Ianto trailed a few paces behind, looking contrite. "Stop this. Now."

Jack stepped back from Hart, shooting a hooded glance at his mother as she appeared by the viewing window. Gwen moved aside to give her space by the air holes.

"Yolan, are you all right?" Jamiya asked with what appeared to be genuine concern.

"Oh, fine, fine. This is just how Jack and I make small talk." Hart winced as he wiped a hand across his swollen mouth. "Won't be doing any passionate kissing for a while, though."

"Good," Gwen called through the glass. "Your kisses are shite."

"Ooh. Still bitter about that, are we?" Hart flashed her a bloody smile.

"What, about your poisoning me and leaving me to suffocate to death in a shipping container?" Gwen sneered. "You're lucky it's Jack in there and not me. I'd cut straight to ripping off your—"

"There is not going to be any more violence," Jamiya declared. "Javic, come out of there. Leave Yolan alone. He's done nothing wrong."

Gwen turned to stare at her. "Nothing wrong? He bombed the city! He killed dozens of innocent people! Not to mention—"

"Fine. Leave him locked up, then, but for heaven's sake stop _hurting_ him." Jamiya shook her head. "You can't right any wrongs he's done by inflicting more pain. And without him I wouldn't be here, so I owe him at least for that."

Jack crossed his arms. "He's up to something, and I want to know what he's planning."

"We all want something." Jamiya fixed Jack with a hard look. "And what I want is to see Gray. I know you have him here."

Ianto transitioned from contrite to convicted in the blink of an eye. Gwen glanced at Jack to see if he noticed, but Jack was staring numbly at his mother.

The resulting silence was unbroken for nearly a minute, except for the occasional drip of water in the back of the vaults. At last Jack's expression faltered, and he let his arms fall to his sides.

"Okay," he said, defeated. "I'll take you to him."

* * *

Ianto finished pushing the sequence of buttons that would unlock the high-security cold storage drawer where Gray had been placed in suspended animation. He'd told Jamiya the barest facts of Gray's revenge, but had he anticipated her desire to see her son's frozen body, he would have left off that bit of the ending. He glanced at Jack, who stood opposite him in clear emotional conflict. "Are you sure about this, Jack?" he murmured.

Jack nodded tightly. "She deserves to see him. Hart was right about that much."

Ianto swung open the metal door and pulled out the drawer, then unzipped the bag containing the body. Even the frosted, motionless visage of Gray made him shudder, and he rested a hand near his holstered pistol as he stepped back to make space for Jack's mother.

Jamiya gazed down at her younger son for a long time in silence. After several minutes she brushed her fingers over his cheek. "He's cold," she whispered.

Jack wrapped an arm about her shoulders. "He's not dead. Just sleeping."

Jamiya's gaze swung to him in sudden hope. "Can we wake him?"

Jack shook his head, and Ianto could see the glint of tears in his eyes. "He's… broken. Whatever those creatures did to him, it destroyed his mind. I couldn't help him. I tried, but I couldn't save him."

Her breath caught in a soft sob. "I wish I could speak to him. Hear the sound of his voice. All these years, I couldn't even imagine what he would grow up to look like."

Jack caught Ianto's eye. "Do we have any security footage that we could show her?"

Ianto understood the implicit request, and tried to remember if the cameras had caught Gray doing anything in the Hub besides sabotaging the facility or murdering Toshiko. He suppressed a shiver at the thought of scanning through the video records of that day and reliving the horror. He'd watched the CCTV footage only once, to record events in the official log for the archive, and the images of Tosh's shooting had wrenched him over his desk in tears.

But this was for Jack's mother, and grief for a lost loved one was something he understood all too well. "I can check," he said carefully.

Jack nodded gratefully, and Jamiya bent forward to press her lips to Gray's forehead. She traced his face one more time before stepping away from the drawer. "Thank you," she said, half-turning toward Ianto. "It means a lot for me to see him."

"Of course." Ianto hesitated beside Gray's body, recalling how awful it had been for him to watch Lisa's ruined body being sealed into cold storage prior to eventual disposal. "Why don't you go on upstairs, and I'll check on that footage after I finish up here?"

Jack nodded in understanding and turned his mother back toward the lift. "You know, we should find you a more comfortable place to stay for the night. There's a nice hotel near here called the St. David. I'll have Gwen make you a reservation, and…"

Ianto waited until their voices had faded before zipping the bag and shoving the drawer back into the wall. "Bastard," he hissed as he slammed the door. "You took Tosh from us, you broke Jack's heart, and now you've made him cry again." He locked the door and leaned against the wall. "Jack may have forgiven you, but I never will."

* * *

It took half an hour for Ianto to find a clip of CCTV footage that was suitable to show Jack's mother. He'd skimmed through the video at high speed—skipping entirely over the section with Toshiko—then clipped a segment, ran a clarity macro, and boosted the audio. He caught Jamiya just as she was about to leave with Gwen for the hotel, and called her over to what had once been Toshiko's workstation. "I've found a bit of video with his voice on it. Would you like to see it?"

"Yes, very much. Thank you." She took the seat he offered her, and Ianto exchanged a glance with Jack over her head before he brought up the video.

In the grainy footage, Gray stood in the middle of one of the Hub's catwalks, dressed in the utilitarian jumpsuit. Another figure moved into the frame, and there was no mistaking John Hart's unique costume. Gray turned to face him. "Is it done?" His voice was flat. Emotionless.

Hart nodded. "He's downstairs. What now?"

"Now, I have work to do. I'll take care of the others. You know what to do with him."

Hart hesitated. "Look, I get that you—"

"You know what to do," Gray repeated more firmly.

"Yeah," Hart sighed, "I do." He turned and left the frame.

The video ended, and Jamiya leaned closer to the display, tracing the indistinct figure with hungry eyes. "Is there more?" She glanced hopefully to Ianto.

He shook his head. "There is, but you really don't want to see it."

For some reason—perhaps because he'd been honest with her before—she took him at his word instead of protesting. "Thank you for this," she said quietly. "From what you told me, I know this can't have been easy for you."

Jack's attention whipped back to Ianto. "What you told…?"

Before Ianto could explain, Jamiya laid a hand on Jack's arm. "Your boyfriend is very loyal," she said with an appreciative look at Ianto. She managed a faint smile and glanced up at Jack. "In fact, from what I've seen so far, I'd say he's a keeper."

Leaving Jack stunned with that statement, she rose and crossed to where Gwen was waiting by the door. "All right, I'm ready to go. Is the lodging far?"

"Not at all. Just the other side of the bay, a few minutes away. I'll drive you." With a final wave at Jack and Ianto, Gwen guided Jamiya toward the lift.

Jack stared after them for a moment, then turned back to Ianto. "You told her?"

Ianto tucked his hands in his pockets and examined his shoes. "Just the basics of what happened. I knew she'd keep at you, so I thought it would be easier on you if I told her. But I didn't tell her about your being buried alive, or the torture, or anything like that."

"Not that. I mean, you told her about us?"

It took a moment for his meaning to register. The parting compliment Jamiya had paid him brought warmth to Ianto's face. "She… sort of… guessed. I think John Hart said something to tip her off."

"Oh." Jack stared pensively at Toshiko's screen, where Gray's figure remained frozen on the display.

"Um. I'll just… start cleaning up then, shall I?"

Jack nodded, distracted, and made his way back to his office.


	6. Chapter 6

"Jack?" Ianto tapped on the glass partition as he stepped into the office. "I've finished for the night. I wanted to see if there was anything you needed before I left."

Jack was leaning against the desk, apparently deep in thought. Wordlessly he extended a hand toward Ianto.

Ianto stepped forward, and when Jack made no other motion, tentatively placed his hand in Jack's open palm. Immediately Jack pulled him closer, slipping arms around his waist and resting his head on Ianto's shoulder. Ianto returned the embrace, relaxing into the comfortable familiarity, and waited for Jack to make the next move.

The hug lasted only a moment before Jack released him. "Just that," he said softly.

Ianto blinked. "Just what?"

"What I needed before you left." Jack smiled up at him, but there was something mournful in his expression. "Good night."

Ianto hesitated at the dismissal. "Are you okay?"

Jack met his eyes, then released a ragged breath. "I don't know," he confessed.

Ianto stroked a hand across Jack's cheek. The stubble beneath his fingertips was a testament to the stress Jack had been under; he hadn't even taken time to shave before their pre-dawn call that morning. And that had been _before_ finding the alien parasite and its victims, the argument with Martha, and the arrival of their unexpected guests from the future. Ianto could only imagine the tempest in Jack's mind right now. "Do you want me to stay?"

Interest flickered briefly in Jack's eyes, but then he shook his head. "I need to get my head on straight first."

"Never stopped you before," Ianto murmured playfully.

Jack chuckled. "I suppose not. But I'm not very good company tonight. Have a lot of things to think about."

"Don't think too hard." Ianto impulsively kissed Jack's forehead, and the warm smile he received bolstered his courage. "Can I ask you something?"

"Sure."

"What your mother called you…" Ianto's tongue formed the word slowly, hesitant to mispronounce it. "Jav…ic?"

Jack's face tightened, but he nodded. "Javic."

"What does it mean?"

Jack's head tipped back, his gaze resting on the ceiling. "'Brave one.' Comes from an Old Velshanian word." His lips twisted. "Not that Velshane will be settled for another thousand years, so I don't know if you can call it 'old' yet…"

"Is it your real name?"

Jack met Ianto's eyes, and for a moment it seemed he wouldn't answer. At last he nodded. "It was. A long time ago."

Ianto tested the word again under his breath, then smiled. "'Brave one.' It suits you."

"No, it doesn't."

The vehemence of Jack's protest startled Ianto. "No?"

"I'm not brave. Never have been."

Ianto clasped Jack's hands. "Jack, you're the bravest man I know."

"I'm a coward." Jack's eyes dropped to their entwined fingers, then strayed to the leather wrist strap he wore. "I've always been a coward."

"How can you say that? All the things you've done, everything you've lived through…"

"Because I had no choice." Jack pulled one hand free and pushed it restlessly through his hair. "I've never been anything but a coward, ever since I was a kid. The day our colony was invaded, I was so intent on running away and saving myself that I left Gray behind. Then I couldn't live with that guilt, so I ran away to war. I was going to make up for what I'd done. Be some kind of hero. Instead, I got my best friend killed, watched everyone around me die… I was so terrified, I couldn't go back. So I ran away again, joined the Time Agency. But that went wrong too, and off I ran again. Started conning people for whatever I could get, then running and hiding before they could find me. And then I met the Doctor…" He gave a wry laugh. "And then we were _always_ running, from _everything_." He sobered and added, "That was the first time in my life I felt like maybe I could stop running. But then _he_ ran away. From _me_." He swallowed with visible difficulty. "And that scared me more than anything else. It _terrified _me. Because what had I become, that even someone like the Doctor was afraid of me?"

Ianto could offer no words of comfort to that, so he tightened his grip on the hand he still held. After a moment Jack continued, his voice low. "And I'm still running. I never contacted my mother because I was ashamed of the things I'd done. I couldn't tell her the truth about Gray because I was afraid of what she'd think of me. Sometimes I wonder if the real reason I didn't go traveling with the Doctor again when he offered was that I was just too scared to face the reality of who I am."

A sudden tightness in Ianto's throat threatened to smother his words, but he forced them out. "At the time, you said you came back for…" _Me_, his heart cried, but at the last moment his voice betrayed him. "…for us."

Jack seemed to return to himself, and as he met Ianto's gaze his expression softened. "I did come back for _us_," he said, with a gentle pressure on Ianto's fingers. "And if I weren't such a coward, I'd…" His voice faltered, and he stared helplessly at Ianto.

After a moment of silence Ianto realized no more words were forthcoming. He released the breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding, and concealed his faint disappointment by bending to kiss Jack. Jack melted into the contact eagerly—or perhaps he was simply grateful that Ianto had granted him a way out of his awkward half-confession.

"You're no coward," Ianto whispered against his cheek when they had parted. "You do what no one else can."

Jack's face remained pressed against Ianto's, but he wobbled his head back and forth in a negative. "I'm scared, all the time."

"We all are. God, Jack, if I ever actually stopped to think about the things we face every day…" He held Jack closer. "But brave isn't the same as fearless. You may be afraid, but you don't let the fear stop you. You do what needs to be done, no matter the consequences. And that's what makes you so brave."

Jack sighed in a way that Ianto knew meant he was tired of arguing and would concede the point only to end the discussion. It was a small victory, but at least it meant Jack wouldn't spend the rest of the evening obsessing over his past failings. "I don't deserve you," he murmured.

Ianto chuckled. "You make me sound like an affliction."

"You know what I mean. The way you look after me. And the way you handled my mother today…" Jack shook his head. "It was brilliant. I don't know how you do it."

"The same way I handle you," Ianto deadpanned.

Jack raised his eyebrows. "Not _quite_ the same way, I hope." His hand strayed suggestively over Ianto's hip, and Ianto laughed.

"No, not quite the same way." Ianto treasured the flash of mirth in Jack's eyes. "Thank you."

Jack regarded him with surprise. "For what?"

"For confiding in me. About your name, I mean." Jack nodded soberly, and Ianto attempted to lighten the mood with a coy smile. "Should I start calling you that in bed?"

Jack shook his head firmly. "I left that name behind for a reason. Believe me, for all his many faults, Jack Harkness is a better man than Javic Piotr Thane ever was."

Ianto filed the name _Javic Piotr Thane _away in his memory and brushed his fingers over Jack's cheek. "I must admit, I'm rather fond of Jack Harkness. I'd hate to switch up at this point."

Jack grinned, the shadows in his face at last falling away. "I'll try never to give you a reason to."

The honest smile triggered a sudden warmth in Ianto's chest. He bent once more to kiss Jack—_his_ Jack, with all his many faults—before glancing toward the hatch that led down to Jack's quarters. "You sure you don't want me to stay?"

"No, you go on home. I'll be fine." Ianto must have looked skeptical, because Jack rolled his eyes. "Ianto, really, I'm fine. You need a full night's sleep for once, and I need to plan our course of action."

"You never plan ahead," Ianto countered. "Is that code for standing on a rooftop and brooding until dawn?"

"It's code for stop worrying about me and go home already!" Jack shoved him gently toward the exit. "Get some rest. I'll see you in the morning."

Ianto turned in the doorway. "Will you do something for me?"

"Sure. What?"

"Go downstairs, take a long, hot shower, and at least _try_ to get some rest. No rooftops, no brooding. Would you do that for me?"

Jack shot him a look that said he knew he was being handled, but nodded. "Fine. But only as a special favor to you."

"Thank you." Ianto smiled beatifically. "Good night."

Jack returned the smile, the rare expression so different from the cocky grin he often projected. "Good night, Ianto."


	7. Chapter 7

As promised, Jack descended the ladder into his bunker as soon as he heard the cog door close behind Ianto. As he stripped off his clothing, he glanced at the bed and wondered briefly about calling Ianto back, but decided against it. After all, it _had _been several days since Ianto had gotten a full night's sleep, and for once Jack needed to face his demons properly, without the distraction of a warm and willing body to lose himself in.

_But oh, what a body__…_

Jack shook himself and stepped into the shower stall, switching the tap to cold to halt that line of thinking. He needed to process all that had happened today, and prioritize his tasks for tomorrow. The reunion with his mother had overshadowed everything else, but that was hardly the only pressing issue: John Hart was locked in a cell in the vaults, undoubtedly planning something dangerous. They had some kind of face-eating alien attacking the residents of Cardiff, with one dead victim awaiting analysis in the autopsy bay, and one live specimen to contain. Rift activity had been steadily increasing for several weeks, which highlighted the problem underlying all of it: Jack's small team was worked nearly to exhaustion. He knew they couldn't maintain their current pace indefinitely. Gwen was right; they needed more operatives.

But Jack had come to realize that recruiting someone for Torchwood was tantamount to a death sentence, and he struggled with this paradox of necessity. Without more support, he was risking Ianto and Gwen every time they went into the field. But if he added to Torchwood's staff, he was exposing more people to the inevitable risks of the job. Anyone he hired might end up like Owen, or Toshiko, or Suzie, or Alex, or any of the hundred other Torchwood operatives he'd seen die in the line of duty.

But then again, without that risk, Cardiff—the whole world—might be in danger. Where did he draw the line? Was it worth it to sacrifice a few lives in order to save thousands?

Was it worth risking those he loved most—Ianto and Gwen—to spare a handful of potential employees he had not yet met?

Jack let these thoughts chase each other through his mind as he showered, and it wasn't until he was shutting off the water that he remembered his promise to Ianto not to think too hard. "No brooding," he sighed, rubbing the water from his short hair. "Right. Happy thoughts." As he toweled himself dry, he tried to think of something pleasant to distract himself. "Ianto in a bathing suit?" It wasn't really working. "Ianto _out of_ a bathing suit?" That was slightly more effective.

Jack was just settling into bed, wondering when he could find time to take Ianto to the south of France and imagining what they could get up to beneath a beach umbrella, when the rift alarm went off. Jack swore vehemently, pulled on the first pieces of clothing his hands found in the darkness, and bolted up the ladder.

Toshiko's workstation—it would always be Toshiko's, no matter who might occupy it in the future—was still the core of their system, and Jack flicked on monitors and activated scanners as he slid into the chair. The system whirred to life, and maps and graphs began appearing on the screens. The rift surge was massive, and centered once again over the diner they'd visited that morning.

Jack glanced at the clock. It was late, and he was reluctant to call his team back in, especially after the obscenely early morning they'd had. But another rift incursion in the same location might bring more of the face-eating aliens into Cardiff, and if they missed capturing one, there was no telling how many people it might kill, or if it would reproduce and create an infestation. They had to contain this at once.

Jack's mobile was back in his office, so he punched out Ianto's number from memory on the land line. As soon as he heard it connect, he began speaking rapidly. "Ianto, we have a rift alert. How quickly can you get back to Morrie's?"

"The cafe from this morning?" Ianto's voice hummed wearily over the connection. "Ten minutes or so, I think. I've just arrived home."

"Good. I'll meet you there in the SUV. Keep an eye on things, but don't engage without me." Jack cut the call, dashed to his office to grab his mobile and the SUV keys from the corner of his desk, then sent Gwen a text message as he ran down the corridor that led to the underground garage.

He made the drive in half the time the SUV's SatNav estimated—Cardiff's streets were less populated this late at night, and Jack had no compunctions about blasting through traffic signals if there were no other vehicles in the intersection—so he arrived just after Ianto, who lived much closer to the diner than the Hub.

Ianto gave Jack a curious glance as he jumped out of the SUV. "Where's your coat?"

Jack glanced down at himself and swore. He'd dressed so quickly, he'd not only neglected to put on his coat, but he had also left behind his Webley and his vortex manipulator. His wrist felt suddenly naked without the wide leather strap encircling it. "Left in a hurry," he answered, reaching into the back of the SUV for a spare pistol, which he tucked into the waistband of his trousers—loose without their customary belt, which he'd also forgotten.

"Is Gwen coming?"

Jack checked his mobile before tossing it back into the driver's seat. "No response yet. I'd say we're on our own."

"Well, at least one of us is getting sleep," Ianto muttered. "So what are we looking for?"

"The readings matched the last flare in this area, so it could be more of those face-sucker things."

"Facehuggers," Ianto corrected absently. "Plan?"

"Go around back and see what there is to see, I guess."

"So, no plan then. Right." Ianto collected a firearm and the handheld scanner from the back of the SUV. "Let's get this over with while there's still a chance I can catch a few hours' sleep when we've finished."

They rounded the diner, Jack lighting the way with a powerful torch while Ianto followed him, watching the scanner. "Be careful, Jack," Ianto warned. "This place is boiling with rift energy. Something may still be coming through."

For an instant it seemed there was a swirl of light in the air before him, but it vanished almost immediately. Jack started to ask Ianto to check it out, but a movement in the darkness drew his attention. He swung the torch to follow it, and shouted in surprise as a strange hand-like creature skittered rapidly across his path. "Did you see that?"

"I wish I hadn't," Ianto answered with a shudder. "Any idea what it was?"

"I didn't get that good a look. But it was fast."

Ianto peered along the row of scrub at the back of the lot. "I saw a film about a disembodied hand once…"

"Time and place," Jack chided. "I think it went—"

He was interrupted by two shots from Ianto's pistol, firing into the weeds. Jack spun toward the sudden rustling in the grass and added a shot of his own. An instant later a grayish form leaped into the air, directly toward his face. Before he could bring his weapon up Ianto's pistol barked once more, and the shape bucked mid-air, bounced off of Jack's shoulder, and landed on the ground just in front of his feet. He jumped back as Ianto stepped closer and pumped five more rounds into its body. The creature's legs twitched once, then curled inward like a dead spider's.

Ianto ejected his spent magazine, slammed a fresh one in and released the slide, still covering the thing on the ground. "Think it's dead?"

His ears still ringing from the gunfire, Jack moved in and toed the creature over with his boot. Though its underbelly was soft, its back bore the same grooved, crustacean-like shell as the alien back at the Hub. As they watched, the remainder of its body crumbled apart, leaving a few orphan legs splayed in the gravel. "Looks like it. At least now we know how our facehuggers get around."

"And we know there are more of them," Ianto added. "Which means they might be loose anywhere in Cardiff."

"Grab a box from the SUV. We'll pack this one up, just in case."

Ianto returned with the containment kit, and in moments they'd secured the remains of the alien in an airtight plastic tub. "What next?" he asked.

"I guess we keep looking around." Jack rubbed his eyes and squinted toward the back of the restaurant, where the haze of light beckoned again. "I keep seeing this… sort of… shimmer thing out of the corner of my eye. Do you see anything?"

Ianto followed the direction of his gaze. "No, I don't see any… Wait! Yes, I saw a flicker, just for an instant." He checked the scanner and frowned. "Very high concentrations of rift energy in that direction. In fact, it seems to be _coming_ from there."

"So we're looking at, what, an actual opening in the rift?"

"Could be. The levels are oscillating, though. If I had to guess, I'd say it's opening and closing very fast. Maybe a weak spot in the fabric of space?"

There was another flash of movement near the corner of the building, and Jack raised his semi-automatic again, missing the familiar grip of his Webley. "I think there's another one over there."

"I didn't see it. Where?"

"Just by the bins, there." Jack eased forward, shining the torch around the area. "I'll try to scare it out."

The pale aurora of rift energy shimmered again, only a few paces from where Jack was shining his light, and Ianto glanced around nervously. "Jack, be careful."

As he spoke a high-powered beam of light swung across them, and Jack threw up an arm to protect his night vision. "Ianto, check that out."

Ianto shielded his own eyes and took a few steps back toward where they'd parked. "It's Gwen."

A moment later, the headlamps died and Gwen jogged toward them, clad in a faded tracksuit with her hair bunched into a messy bun. "Sorry I'm late! I was asleep when your text came. Rhys found it and woke me. What've we got?"

Ianto returned to covering Jack as he brought her up to speed. "An open rift with more facehuggers pouring in. Killed one, but Jack thinks he saw another hiding around here somewhere. No idea how many might have landed."

"Gwen, go around to my right," Jack called, his eyes still fixed on the corner where he thought he'd spotted movement. "If you see a creepy thing the size of a cat that looks like a walking hand, shoot it."

"A walking hand?" she echoed as she took her position. "What, like running around on two fingers?"

"All its fingers, but yeah. Basically, shoot anything that moves. Get ready; I'm going to force it out in the open."

"Jack—" Ianto began.

"I know, I know. Be careful." He lunged forward and kicked over one of the bins, which clattered to the ground and rolled, scattering refuse everywhere. An instant later a gray form leaped out into the open, rotating on its spindly legs before leaping toward Gwen.

Jack jumped into its path and winged it with a lucky shot; the thing was moving too quickly and erratically to aim properly. The creature landed and took off across the pavement, and this time Gwen and Ianto both scored shots on it. With one last burst of effort the creature jumped again, angling weakly toward Jack, who was nearest. Jack dodged easily to the side and fired his last two rounds at the alien. One shot caught its shell and flipped it over. It landed on its back and kicked feebly before going still.

"_Jack!_" He glanced up just in time to see Ianto's expression of horror before it was occluded by a pale shimmer of light, and too late he realized he'd dodged right into the rift oscillation. The dark lot faded, as did the solid pavement beneath his feet, and suddenly he was falling.

The unclouded light of day seared his retinas, but Jack thought he caught a glimpse of a broad plain of sand flying toward him just before everything went black.


	8. Chapter 8

"But where could it have taken him?" Gwen asked again.

"I don't know, Gwen. I don't know!" Ianto lobbed the containment box into a cell and slammed the door. He slumped against the clammy vault wall and scrubbed a hand across his face. "Anywhere. Nowhere. We don't have any way of tracking him."

"Was there anything on the handheld that could help?"

Ianto shook his head wearily. "The scanner only detects rift energy. It can't tell us where the other end of the rift opens up. If he truly went through the rift… he could be literally anywhere in time or space right now."

"Beg pardon, but did you say _Jack _went through the rift?" John Hart's voice echoed in the chamber. His cell was only two doors down from where they had deposited the dead facehuggers, just on the other side from Gwen's giant spider, still trapped in its crate.

"Not that it's any of your business," Gwen muttered, "but yes."

There was the creaking of a cot as Hart rolled to his feet. When he spoke again, his voice was nearer the door. "What would it be worth to you if I could track him down?"

Hope flared briefly in Ianto's chest before he remembered who was speaking. "Even if I thought you could, I'm not letting you out of there."

Hart gave a snort. "I never dreamed you would. At this point, I'm just hoping to negotiate for a hot meal and some comfortable bedding."

Gwen exchanged a look with Ianto, then stepped closer to the cell door. "How would you do it? Hypothetically speaking, of course."

"Of course," Hart answered dryly. "I can track the signature from his vortex manipulator by using mine."

"No deal," Gwen snapped. "You think we're stupid enough to let you get your hands on that device?"

"Depends on how badly you want to find Jackie boy."

"Regardless, it won't work," Ianto cut in. "Jack wasn't wearing his wrist strap."

"Oh." Hart's voice lost some of its confident sneer. "That _is_ bad. Also surprising, considering his training. Most of us never take them off, except to bathe. Or if we're taken captive and forced to remove them," he added sourly.

_Bathe_. Ianto flinched as he realized why Jack wasn't wearing his full kit. It was his fault. If he hadn't made Jack promise to have a shower and relax, Jack wouldn't have…

Gwen's voice brought him back to the present. "If you've nothing more useful to contribute, you can stay here and rot," she spat at the door to Hart's cell.

"Hey! Don't you even feed prisoners here?" Hart pounded on the door. "I haven't eaten in almost two days!"

"Should have thought of that before you came to Earth," Gwen called as she climbed the steps to the main corridor.

Hart sighed. "How about you, Eye Candy? You still out there?"

"I am. I'm trying to decide whether to let you starve, or poison you to speed up the process."

"Feel the love," Hart muttered. "Why does Jack keep you around, again? Oh, right, that's pretty obvious…"

"Call me Eye Candy again, and I'll bypass the poison and just shoot you."

"Nah, I don't think you would," sneered Hart. "It's too messy. Might muss your fancy suit."

Ianto stepped nearer the door. "Look up. See that pipe over your head?"

"Yeah. What about it?"

"It's part of the automatic sterilization system." Ianto's voice turned dark. "I don't even have to enter the room to clean up. I can push a button from the comfort of my office, and erase every last trace of you. And those ventilation holes in the opposite wall are just large enough to accommodate a nine-millimeter barrel." He paused for effect. "Ask me how I know this. Go on, I dare you."

There was a long silence within the cell. Finally Hart spoke again, though his tone was much more moderate. "Okay, seriously, I'm willing to bargain for food. What do you want from me? I'll try to help you find Jack. I'll even behave while doing it, if that's what it takes to get you to feed me."

Ianto rubbed the bridge of his nose. "I'll see what I can find, and we'll fetch you if we need you. But no promises."

"Fair enough," sighed Hart.

Ianto climbed the steps to find Gwen waiting for him in the corridor. She eyed him curiously as she fell into step beside him. "I didn't know we had an automatic sterilization system."

"We don't. Those pipes are just the drains from the upper level of the vaults."

"So you just made all that up to scare him?"

"Yup."

Gwen raised her eyebrows appreciatively. "Remind me never to get on your bad side."

* * *

Neither of them went home that night, though Gwen caught an hour's sleep on the sofa after calling Rhys to let him know the situation. Ianto pored over energy readings and dug deep into Toshiko's records of previous rift events, but apart from confirming a substantial negative energy spike, he found nothing that could help them locate Jack. Finally he set an alert for any energy readings that matched the ones they'd been investigating, then stood and stretched aching muscles. As he arched his back, his stomach growled loudly enough that Gwen heard it from her desk.

"Hungry?" she called, glancing over from where she was filling out a stack of overdue reports. She had exhausted all her other coping mechanisms earlier in the night, and had resorted to pure drudgery to keep her mind off Jack's disappearance.

"Starving," Ianto replied. He glanced at his watch and groaned. "Is it really half six?"

"We've been at it all night." Gwen dropped her pen and rubbed her eyes. "You feel up to making coffee?"

After Ianto had produced two mugs of strong coffee, they scoured the kitchenette and desks for anything resembling food. The search revealed two individually-packaged pastries, well past their expiration date, and a half-consumed bag of crisps. "If we want food, looks like we'll have to go out for it," said Ianto. He plopped the stale snacks on a plate and gestured toward the stairs. "I'll feed these to Hart."

Gwen raised an eyebrow. "I'm sure he'll love that."

"If he complains, Janet will be happy to have them."

John Hart wisely held his tongue, though the look on his face eloquently described what he thought of his "meal." "How's the search for Jack coming?" he asked, tearing open one of the pastry packages with his teeth.

Ianto rolled his neck, feeling the pull of knotted muscles. "About the same."

"The offer of help is still open." Hart spoke around a mouthful of stale bread.

"Nothing you can do at the moment."

Hart's brow furrowed thoughtfully as he chewed, but he said nothing more.

Ianto left him to his breakfast and returned to the main level of the Hub. "Food?" he prompted Gwen, who was sprawled on the sofa, half-dozing.

"I'm up." Gwen yawned and stretched. "In or out?"

Ianto glanced around the Hub. "Out. Maybe it will clear our heads to get out of here for a bit. Get some new ideas."

They had just emerged from the secret door into the tourist office when the street door opened. Ianto spun toward it hopefully, on the verge of calling out to Jack—but his heart sank on seeing Jamiya Thane, rather than her son.

"Good morning," Jamiya greeted them, taking in Ianto's disheveled appearance and Gwen's glorified pajamas. "I wasn't sure how early your work day started, so…"

Ianto ran a hand through his mussed hair. "We've been here all night," he explained. "Bit of an emergency."

"Oh! I hope it's nothing too serious?"

Gwen crossed to Jamiya and took her arm. "Actually… Jack's gone."

Jamiya canted her hand. "Gone? Gone where?"

"We don't know," Ianto sighed. He pressed the switch to open the Hub door again. "We'll explain downstairs."

They descended to the Hub, and Gwen led Jamiya toward the sofa. "You see, Cardiff, this city, has a rift in space-time running right through the middle of it. That's why we're here—to clean up things that come through it. But sometimes, instead of things falling out of the rift, things get pulled _into_ it."

Comprehension was beginning to dawn on Jamiya's face. "And you're saying that's what's happened to my son? He was pulled into this rift?"

Gwen nodded. "We were out on a call last night, and there was this sort of portal…"

Jamiya looked from Gwen to Ianto. "But you can track him, can't you? You surely have equipment to monitor this rift?"

"Monitor, yes, but only from this end. Once something is in the rift, we have no way to tell where it's gone."

Jamiya frowned. "But you should be able to track the energy signatures."

"Our equipment is very advanced, but it can't penetrate the rift itself," Ianto added. "It can only record the energy released by the rift."

Jamiya shook off Gwen's grasp. "Show me."

With a weary shrug, Ianto led her to Toshiko's workstation and accessed the rift monitor program. Jamiya promptly seated herself and began poking awkwardly at the keyboard. "These input systems are so… so… _primitive_," she muttered. "How do you reconfigure the particle matrix?"

"Um, I'm not sure that's a good…"

"I'm an engineer from three thousand years in your future. Forgive me for being blunt, but I think I know a bit more about energy-scanning systems than you do." She squinted at the device Jack had strapped to her wrist, touched a button, and then blinked a few times. "There! That seems to be the setting for written alphabets." She focused on the screen again and tapped a few keys. "Give me some time with this. It's an unfamiliar system, so it might take me a while to do what I need to."

Ianto and Gwen exchanged glances, and Ianto fought the spring of hope that tried to well up within him. "I'll go find us some food," he said abruptly, and hurried toward the cog door.

* * *

When he returned an hour later, laden with carrier bags, Gwen and Jamiya were arguing. Ianto experienced a surreal sense of _deja vu_: Jamiya's posture was so like Jack's, and Gwen had unconsciously adopted the same stance she always used when disagreeing with him. "Everything all right?" Ianto asked, depositing the shopping on the nearest desk.

Gwen sighed. "She wants us to let Hart out, _and _give him Jack's wrist strap."

"I need his help," Jamiya insisted. "I've adapted your monitoring program to track energy signatures, but I don't know enough about discrete temporal disruption patterns to set the parameters. Yolan is a Time Agent; he's far more familiar with that application of the technology."

Ianto paced as he thought it over. "I think I have a solution. Gwen, the wrist straps are on Jack's desk."

Gwen stared at him. "You're going to let him out? What if he takes off again? He even stole Jack's wrist strap last time—"

"I'm not giving him free rein," Ianto promised. "Back shortly." He took a detour to pick up a few items from the armory before descending to the vaults.

John Hart was stretched out on the cot, but rose to his feet when he heard Ianto at the door. "Don't tell me it's lunch time already?"

"Turn around," Ianto ordered as he swung the door open, motioning with the semiautomatic he held. "Hands behind you."

Hart complied, watching him warily. Ianto cuffed his hands securely, then holstered the pistol. "Put one foot up on the bed."

"Last time I was in this situation, it was just 'bend over and spread your legs,'" Hart drawled.

Ianto refused to give him the satisfaction of a response, and waited silently until Hart shrugged and planted one boot on the cot frame. Ianto strapped a device to his ankle, secured it with a heavy steel cable and deadlock closure, then drew his pistol again and stepped back to clear a path to the door. "Move. Out, left, up the stairs. Try anything, and I shoot."

Hart complied, and soon they were in the main level of the Hub. Jamiya brightened when she saw Hart, though her expression turned to concern as she took in his disheveled appearance, the bruises on his face, and the wrist restraints.

Gwen was standing nearby, holding both vortex manipulators. "Ianto, I really don't think this is a good idea."

"Don't worry, Gwen." Ianto stepped behind Hart and removed the handcuffs. "He's not going anywhere."

"I'm not?" Hart raised an eyebrow as he rubbed his wrists. "Tell me more, Eye Ca—" Ianto reached for the pistol, and Hart broke off. "I mean, Mr. Jones."

"That," Ianto pointed to the device on Hart's ankle, "is a temporal anchor. It's configured to keep whatever it's attached to in this place and time. You try to teleport out or travel in time, and at best, you'll be missing a limb. More likely, you'll be dismantled on a quantum level, your atoms dispersed through space. I imagine it would be quite painful, for that one brief instant before your nervous system ceased to exist."

"So, in other words, I'm under house arrest," Hart sighed. "Well, it beats being in that cave downstairs." He examined the device and cabling wrapped over his boot. "I suppose I'll have to shower with one boot on?"

"You'll only have to wear it when you're out of your cell." Ianto smiled coldly. "So don't complain too much, or I might have to put you back in."

Hart held up his hands in surrender. "Just tell me what you want me to do."

Ianto turned Hart over to Jamiya, who began explaining what she had done to the rift monitor. He was about to return to the kitchenette to put away the groceries he'd bought when his arm was caught by Gwen.

"You," she said, planting a light kiss on his cheek, "are _brilliant_, you are."

Ianto merely smiled. "I try my best."


	9. Chapter 9

_Pain._

Pain and darkness.

Pain, and darkness, and a searing _wrongness_, a sense of being dragged backward against the grain.

Pain. Suffocation. A driving need to breathe.

Jack lurched back into the light, gasping that first desperate breath as his body quickened. Sand choked him, filling his mouth as he tried to inhale, and he coughed and sputtered. His throat and lungs burned and he rolled over, bracing himself on his arms and expelling fine powder with each convulsion.

It was several minutes before his wheezing breaths were unencumbered by debris, and when he could finally breathe freely he slumped back into the sand in exhaustion. His face burned, both from contact with the hot sand and from the intense rays of the sun beating down on him. He hadn't been anywhere this blindingly hot since the campaign in North Africa…

Jack forced himself to open his eyes—the bright light was painful, even when he shaded them with both hands—and take stock of his surroundings. Dunes of white-gold sand stretched as far as he could see in every direction, and waves of heat distorted the horizon. Slowly he turned in a circle, seeking any sign of civilization. He needed to find some form of shelter, at least; he didn't know how long he'd been lying in the sun before he'd awakened, but his exposed skin was already red and irritated. He knew from experience that once the sun went down, places this dry tended to become dangerously cold.

At last he spotted a dark shape flickering beneath the heat shimmer in the distance. Praying it was not a mirage, Jack began the slow, arduous trek toward the unknown.

* * *

"Morning, everyone," Gwen called as the cog door rolled back. She made her way carefully up the few steps, struggling to see around a large bakery box in her arms.

"Morning," Ianto called back from the kitchenette. "Coffee will be ready shortly. What's in the box?"

"I've brought breakfast." She deposited the box on her desk, extracted a fruit-studded muffin from it, and crossed to the workstation where Jamiya and John Hart were seated. "'Elp orseff," she said through a mouthful. She swallowed. "Yes, even you, Vera."

"Vera?" Jamiya looked around curiously.

"Her little pet name for me." Hart grinned up at Gwen and pursed his lips in a silent kiss.

Gwen ignored him. "Any progress?"

"A little." Jamiya turned back to the computers. "Yolan has managed to isolate Jack's personal energy signature."

"That sounds good. How?"

"All Time Agency-issued vortex manipulators are both biometrically and telepathically attuned to their user," Hart explained. "It was supposed to function as a kind of bio-lock, so they couldn't be sold on the black market, but there are so many workarounds that it was never effective. Buggy as hell, too. One good bender, and the wrist strap wouldn't recognize your biometrics." He shrugged. "Most of us deliberately cracked the lock before the first mission."

"But Jack didn't?"

"Oh, he did, but he never bothered to delete the original settings." He picked up Jack's wrist strap, now connected to Toshiko's computer via several delicate cables. "I ran a system reset and was able to pull the original data pack. That, combined with the hopper logs, gave me enough to construct an energy profile for him. Jamiya's setting the parameters to track it now."

Gwen stared down at him, actually impressed. "Nice work."

Hart looked up, equally surprised at her approbation, then quickly turned away. "Are there more of… whatever it is you're eating? I'm starved." He quickly crossed to Gwen's desk and opened the box. "Jamiya, do you want anything?"

"I'll have something when I'm finished with this, thanks." She continued typing, toggling between screens of code that Gwen wasn't certain were in any Earth-known programming language.

Ianto appeared then, bearing a tray of aromatic coffees. Gwen took her own mug, then noticed that the other mugs were Owen's and Toshiko's. The nostalgic sight aroused a stab of grief, and she turned away as John Hart returned to his workstation. He reached for a coffee.

"Not that one," Ianto said sharply as Hart's hand hovered over Toshiko's mug. Hart hesitated, then reached cautiously for Owen's mug, taking it when there was no further protest. He peered suspiciously into the coffee and sniffed it before taking a sip, then glanced over curiously as Ianto set the other mug at Jamiya's elbow. At last he shrugged and returned to work.

Gwen followed Ianto back to the kitchenette. "Thanks for that," she said quietly. "I don't think I could bear to see him using Tosh's mug."

"I don't like him using Owen's, either, but… it's not as bad, somehow. I mean, Owen was dead before he… you know." Ianto sighed. "If I'd thought of it, I'd have brought some extras from home."

Gwen nodded in understanding. "It's a bit silly, isn't it? How much meaning we ascribe to little things like that. I mean, it's just a mug."

"Can't be that silly, if we both thought the same thing." Ianto gave her a sad little smile, and Gwen bumped his shoulder affectionately with hers.

Before Ianto could fill his own mug, an alarm sounded from Toshiko's workstation. They both hurried over to where Jamiya had pushed back from the desk. "What is it? What did I do?"

"It's not you," Gwen explained as Ianto commandeered the keyboard to display the rift monitoring program. "What do we have, Ianto?"

He swore under his breath. "Three guesses."

"Morrie's?"

"Got it in one." Ianto pushed the keyboard back. "Gwen and I will handle this. You two, stay here and keep working. If anything else comes in while we're gone…" He paused to scribble something and attached a sticky note to the side of one monitor. "There's our mobile numbers. Call us if anything happens."

Both of them were out the door before Jamiya and Hart looked at the note, then at each other.

"Call?" Jamiya wondered aloud. "How? What does this number sequence mean?"

"I'm guessing it's part of some sort of primitive communications technology." Hart went back to the pastry box. "We'll ask later. Let's see… Sweet roll or scone?"

* * *

The lot behind Morrie's looked much the same as it had the previous two visits, though neither Gwen nor Ianto were as relaxed as they'd been the first night. Seeing Jack vanish before their eyes had shaken them more than they would admit even to each other.

As before, Ianto swung the scanner around himself in a wide arc. "It's hard to tell which rift energy traces are new, and which are left over from all the previous incidents," he groused. "This whole area is saturated." He kicked at some debris on the ground. "Watch your step. There are bits of metal all over the place."

"I saw those last time." Gwen chewed her lip. "Ianto, you don't suppose… I mean, this is where Jack was taken. Is there a chance the rift could bring him back?"

Ianto pretended he hadn't been fixated on that thought ever since the alert had come in. "I suppose it's possible. It certainly would make things easier if he came to us. But I don't think we can count on it. And even if he did…"

"There's no telling what it might have done to him." She shivered. "I keep thinking of Jonah Bevan. Something like that couldn't happen to Jack, could it? Being… mutated, like that?"

"I don't really know. I mean, he's immortal. We've seen him survive all sorts of physical trauma, and he never has any scars afterward. But…" For all Jack claimed to be a fixed, immutable point in time, Ianto knew Jack's body didn't reset completely after a death. Jack had confessed to him that sometimes he felt lingering pain from fatal injuries, even weeks later. And Jack's body changed over time: His hair grew, his weight fluctuated, and he'd sulked for a week once after finding a gray hair. Who knew what radiation, or exposure to vacuum, or any of a thousand other harmful things in the universe might do to him? "I just don't know," he said again.

The scanner chirped in his hand, and Ianto brought his attention back to the lot before them. "Something in the grass, over there."

Gwen raised her pistol and took a tentative step forward. "Why do you think they haven't come after us, the way that one attacked Jack?"

"Maybe these aren't hungry." Ianto slipped the scanner into his pocket and drew his own pistol. "I'll take right, you take left. Shoot as soon as you see anything; these buggers are _fast_."

They approached the grassy area with caution, watching and listening for any sign of life, but it wasn't until Gwen was three steps into the deep weeds that anything moved. She let out a yelp and fired two shots as something rustled near her feet. Before Ianto could move to assist, a gray form sprang into the air, angling toward Gwen's face. She brought her arms up reflexively, and by mere chance two of the creature's spindly legs caught on the outside of her wrist. Its other legs scrabbled for a grip on her head, and she screamed in pain as one sharp claw punctured the skin behind her ear.

Ianto took aim, but he couldn't risk his shot hitting Gwen. He drew his stun gun and planted it firmly in the creature's back, but the shock seemed only to agitate the alien. It redoubled its efforts to sink its legs into Gwen's neck.

Gwen managed to twist her arm so that her trapped hand was facing outward, and she clawed at the creature's soft underbelly while pulling at its embedded leg with her other hand. Ianto seized the edges of the carapace and pulled with all his strength, but all he succeeded in doing was dragging Gwen forward. They needed more leverage…

"Gwen!" Ianto shouted. "Fall backward, onto the ground!"

He had to repeat himself before she seemed to register his words, and she let her knees go soft. The strain on his arms increased as the creature tried to hold on while supporting more and more of her body weight. At last, with a sickening _pop_, the alien detached from Gwen's face. Ianto flew back and nearly toppled, only just managing to stay upright and maintain his grip on the squirming crablike thing.

With an inhuman growl, Gwen retrieved her pistol and rose to her knees. "Put it on the ground," she rasped.

Ianto couldn't lay the alien out as flat as he would have liked, but he held it low and twisted his face away from any debris that might be kicked up by bullets striking the pavement. Gwen emptied the rest of her magazine into the alien, and only forbore to reload and repeat the process when Ianto pointed out that the now-limp creature already had its middle punched out like a doughnut.

* * *

As they entered the Hub, Ianto dropped the containment box with the crumbled remains of the alien unceremoniously on the floor before guiding Gwen directly to the medical bay.

"Ianto, I'm fine," Gwen protested as he insisted on holding her arm to escort her down the stairs. "I can walk."

"Don't want to take any chances," Ianto murmured as he collected supplies. He'd done a cursory field treatment using the SUV's first-aid kit, but her wound needed proper sterilization and bandaging. "Here, sit and tilt your head back. Let's remove the gauze… there. I'll start with a saline rinse."

Ianto glanced up from his task to see that Jamiya and John Hart had followed them downstairs. "What happened?" Jamiya asked. "Gwen, are you hurt?"

"Not badly," Gwen called, her voice strained from the unnatural angle of her neck. It would have been easier if she'd been able to lie down for treatment, but the emaciated body they'd recovered two days before was still occupying the metal table. "A facehugger got fresh and tried to kiss me." Her eyes flicked to Hart. "Must be a relative of yours."

"Not if it failed," Hart retorted smoothly.

"Facehugger?" Jamiya echoed.

For reply, Gwen pointed to the body on the table. "One of those things. We've been dealing with an infestation or… something. They keep dropping through the rift in the same spot." She shifted an arm to better support her head. "That's what Jack was fighting when he was pulled through."

Ianto's eyes tracked Hart as he wandered over to examine the body and its alien parasite. He lifted the sheet they'd thrown over the man's naked body, and Ianto couldn't suppress an eyeroll as he saw Hart's eyes migrate to the victim's groin. Just like Jack…

At the thought of Jack, Ianto's stomach ached, and he wrenched his attention back to Gwen's neck. Treating her was critical. He couldn't afford to lose anyone else; he and Gwen were all that was left, and they had to stay together, keep Torchwood running. It might be weeks or months before Jack returned. Or years. Or perhaps…

Ianto forcibly halted that line of thinking. He _knew _Jack would come back to them. He would find a way. Even when he had left again to help the Doctor against the Daleks, he'd promised—repeatedly—that he would come back.

Hart had picked up a probe and was poking the alien facehugger, watching its legs twitch and tighten. "Oi!" Gwen snapped when she saw what he was doing. "Could you _not_?"

Hart shrugged. "Just seeing what it does. It's still alive, you know."

"And so's the unfortunate bloke it's attached to, and he'd probably appreciate it not digging deeper into his neck." Gwen winced as Ianto swabbed antiseptic into her wound. "Speaking from personal experience, it's not a pleasant sensation."

"Nah," said Hart, tossing the probe on a tray, "he doesn't care. His brain's probably mush by now."

Ianto froze. Jack had also said something about the first victim's brain… "What do you mean, mush?"

Hart shrugged. "Well, if I didn't know better, I'd say that was a Kantrofarri."

"A what?"

"Telepathic hunters. They're harmless as long as you aren't aware of them, but the moment you see them, they attack. Drill into your skull and drink your brain. Dissolve it from the inside."

Gwen shuddered. "So if it's not a Kan-whatever, what is it?"

"I don't know. Maybe it is a Kantrofarri."

Ianto frowned. "You just said it wasn't."

"Yeah, but who listens to me? It just seemed an appropriately dramatic thing to say." He bent to examine the alien again. "Probably shouldn't leave it loose, though. Once it finishes with this poor bastard, it'll probably crawl off to lay eggs. Plenty of nooks and crannies in this place." He glanced around the Hub. "Makes you wonder what else you have living in your attic."

"Oh, not too much. The pterodactyl eats most of the smaller vermin." Gwen pulled away as Ianto picked up a second variety of antiseptic. "Ianto, I think I'm thoroughly disinfected. Just stick a plaster on it."

"The pterodactyl," Hart echoed. "Right."

"Pteranodon, actually," Ianto corrected primly as he smoothed down a bandage. "She's trained to eat trespassers and anyone who gets out of line—so do be careful where you step." He gave Hart a pointed look.

Hart shrugged and wandered back up the stairs. Jamiya followed a moment later, after expressing to Gwen that she was glad she hadn't been more seriously injured.

When they'd gone, Ianto turned to the body on the table and straightened the sheet that Hart had rumpled. Gwen joined him, shuddering as she looked at the alien. "That could have been me," she murmured. "Thanks for your help out there."

Ianto nodded absently. He felt Gwen's eyes on him, and turned to see her giving him an odd look. "What?" For answer, she looked down at his hand. Ianto followed her gaze, and flushed as he realized he was holding the victim's hand between both of his. "Oh. I…" He sighed and tucked the man's arm beneath the sheet. "I just wish we could help him. Or… comfort him. Something. It seems like we spend all our time saving the world, but sometimes we can't save _people_."

"We do what we can, Ianto, but with just the three of us…" Gwen shook her head. "Two of us, now. At least until we find Jack."

"I know." He gazed at the victim again and drew a deep breath. "I'm going to transfer him to Flat Holm."

Gwen looked up sharply. "Do you think that's wise? What Hart said, about this thing laying eggs…"

"Yeah, but like he said, who listens to him?" Ianto shook his head. "Look: We know this man wasn't the only victim, and there could be more of those creatures around that we haven't found yet. If so, we need to study their biology and what they do to the people they attack, so we can try to save any future victims we find, or at least come up with a better way to defend ourselves against them. The doctors at Flat Holm can continue the medical testing Martha started. We don't have the knowledge or manpower to look after him properly here. The best we could do is put him in cold storage, which would definitely kill the man, might or might not kill the alien, and _still_ wouldn't tell us anything useful."

Gwen sighed. "All right, if you think that's the best option. Can you manage him on your own? I'll help if you need me, only I _really_ don't like that place."

"Been doing it on my own since Jack made me administrator of the facility two years ago. No reason I can't manage it this time."

She gave him a grateful smile. "You're an absolute treasure, Ianto. You know that, don't you?"

"I certainly do," he deadpanned. "But it's nice to have someone else recognize it for a change."


	10. Chapter 10

Jack wasn't sure how many hours he'd been walking. Since he'd awakened on this planet and begun moving, he had collapsed twice from heat and dehydration, both times coming back to life with a face full of sand. He'd already determined he wasn't on Earth; his time sense told him the sun had been in the same place in the sky for far too long, and his shadow had grown only a few inches longer in all the time he'd been here. The extra-long days and intense solar radiation explained _why _this place was a desert, but it didn't give him a clue where he was. His head was pounding, and he knew he was spiraling toward another collapse, but he was determined to make as much progress as possible before it happened.

He'd just crested another dune when he saw it: A huge metallic hulk loomed in a trough between this dune and the next. It looked like the shell of a craft, possibly a crashed airship or spaceship of some kind. This must have been what he'd seen in the distance all those hours ago.

Jack started down the loose sand on the leeward side of the dune, but the heat defeated him before he was halfway down. As he collapsed forward, tumbling down the incline with the sand filling his eyes and nose, he did not try to slow his fall. At least when he came back to life this time, he would be that much closer to shelter.

* * *

"We'll take good care of him, Mr. Jones," Helen assured Ianto. The facehugger victim was being wheeled into a ward on a gurney, surrounded by an attentive flock of Flat Holm nurses. His thin body had been rendered decent in a paper gown, making the raw skin of his arms and legs stand out even more sharply against the white hospital linens. "I'll keep you updated with the results of the testing."

Ianto nodded silently as he signed the admission paperwork. He wasn't certain what was responsible for the deep sense of melancholy he was feeling. What he'd told Gwen was certainly true—he felt sorry for this nameless victim, wasting away while an alien parasite devoured his brain—but there was something more, something undefinable, that made him feel almost guilty for handing the body over. He had complete trust in the doctors and nurses Jack had chosen for Flat Holm, but somehow it still felt as though by relinquishing this man into the institution's care, Ianto was shirking his personal responsibility.

Ianto followed the gurney under the pretense of examining the alien one more time, but as he stood beside it, his hand sought the victim's and gave it a gentle squeeze. _I__'m sorry_.

"Be careful of that creature," Ianto warned aloud. "There's a chance it could detach from its victim and attack someone else, and so far we haven't found anything that can make it let go once it's attached."

Helen nodded. "Of course. We'll keep the room sealed, and all staff will wear protective gear when working with the patient."

Ianto took one last look at the emaciated body and sighed. "I'd better get back. With Jack… out of town, we're spread a little thin."

* * *

Gwen climbed the stairs from the autopsy bay with a heavy step, rolling her shoulders experimentally. She had tried to limit her analgesic use, knowing she couldn't afford the drowsiness or lack of focus that came with stronger painkillers, but the dose of paracetamol she'd taken that morning just wasn't compensating for the stabbing pain below her jaw. Whatever appendage the facehugger had dug into her neck had left a ragged, angry hole that was beginning to throb with every heartbeat. Ianto had disinfected the wound site, but Gwen still wondered if she should be on some kind of oral antibiotic. She'd have to go to A&E for that, though; she didn't have any idea what was best to take, or in what dosage. It wasn't as though she could spare the time to go see a real doctor, anyway. In the mean time, she'd have to make do with managing the pain.

Searching for pain remedies had given her something else to think about. Owen had always kept the stronger medicines under lock and key, but since losing their medic, the team had adopted something of an open-drawer policy. Now that John Hart was loose in the Hub, Gwen wondered if she should find a means of locking up _all_ their chemical substances. There was no telling what Hart might swallow recreationally.

Gwen reached the main level of the Hub and glanced around. "Where did John go?"

Jamiya, seated at Toshiko's desk as usual, glanced back over her shoulder. "He was here a little while ago. Why?"

"I don't trust him out of sight." Gwen went to her workstation and pulled up the Hub's internal scanners. "I mean, I don't trust him, period, but even less so when I can't see him."

Jamiya sighed. "I wish you'd give him a chance. He's really not that bad once you get to know him."

"He poisoned me and left me to die," Gwen countered. "_And_ he blew up a building we were all in. Oh, and he set off bombs all around the city, resulting in the death or injury of at least sixty people. And that's not counting the murders we know he committed on other planets—"

"Point taken," Jamiya conceded. "All I know is, he always treated me well."

"Yes, well, I suppose everyone has an off day once in a while." The Hub's scanners finished their cycle and flashed a dot on screen, indicating a life sign a short distance away. "John!" Gwen shouted. "What are you doing in Jack's office?"

"Eavesdropping," he answered shamelessly, appearing in the doorway with a glass in his hand. "My ears were burning. Only nice things, I hope?"

"You tell me what you were doing in there, or your ears won't be all that burns." Her hand strayed to her pistol, which she'd taken to wearing around the Hub now that Hart had the run of the place.

Hart waggled the tumbler in his hand. A fair amount of amber liquid sloshed within the crystal. "Just sampling some of Jack's liquid refreshment. I have to say, I'm not terribly impressed with your twenty-first century brewers. Though the one with the numbers on it wasn't bad."

Gwen frowned. "The numbers? What are you…" Her eyes widened in horror. "No—not the Macallan Fine & Rare. You didn't!"

"I didn't?" He swallowed half of what was in his glass in one gulp. "If you say so."

Gwen recalled Jack showing her and Ianto the precious decanter one night, after a discussion of the pros and cons of time travel. He'd picked it up decades before, when it was first bottled, knowing it would only appreciate in value. "That bottle was worth over _twenty thousand pounds!_"

Hart stared blankly. "And… that's a lot, is it?"

Gwen's jaw worked soundlessly for a few seconds. "It's more than some families make in a year!" she choked out at last.

"Huh." He tossed back the remainder of the liquid in his glass and swished it around experimentally. "Well, it doesn't taste like a month's wages, but then neither does Duvorian fire nectar, and look what people pay for that."

Gwen growled low in her throat. "When Jack gets back, he is going to _kill you_. Assuming you survive that long, which I'm beginning to doubt." She jabbed a finger at a chair near Jamiya's workstation. "Sit there where I can keep an eye on you. If I catch you in Jack's office again, I'll shoot you."

Hart raised his hands in a sarcastic surrender, but did as she instructed. "You used to be more fun."

"Loads of fun, before I met you."

He dropped into the chair and waved the tumbler he still held. "Can I at least get a refill?"

Gwen snatched the glass away and slammed it down on her workstation. "And stay out of Jack's liquor cabinet!"

Hart rolled his eyes. "The service here is terrible. See if I ever come back here again."

"Oh, if only," Gwen muttered under her breath. She paused and took a long look at Hart. "Now that I think of it, why _are_ you here? Why did you come back in the first place?"

Hart shrugged. "I brought Jamiya to see her boy."

"No, there's more to it than that. There's got to be. There's something in all this for you. What is it?"

He leaned back in the chair and stretched his legs out before him. "You're right, of course. Maybe it's all some kind of nefarious ploy. Maybe I devised this sneaky little plan to get inside your Hub, and use your quaint twenty-first century technology to rip off a few billion credits. Maybe it's part of a greater scheme to knock over an interplanetary bank, and I need some equipment from your archives to open the vault. Maybe I wanted to mess with Jack again, just to drive him crazy. Or maybe—just maybe, mind you—I've actually developed a conscience, and I want to make up for some of the bad things I've done because I feel bad about what happened with Gray." Hart shrugged. "One of those explanations has at least a grain of truth to it, but I'm not going to tell you which one." He winked and blew her a kiss. "At least, not unless you ask _really_ nicely."

"Keep dreaming," Gwen snapped. The Hub's land line rang then, and she was grateful for the distraction from Public Enemy Number Infinity.

"You shouldn't antagonize her," Jamiya chided him softly as Gwen hurried back to her desk.

Gwen could hear the grin in Hart's voice. "But it's such _fun_!"

Fun was the last thing on Gwen's mind when she slammed the receiver into the cradle a few minutes later. She uttered a long, inarticulate sound of frustration. "Why now?" she cried when she'd exhausted her repertoire of angry growling.

Jamiya looked up from the computer. "What's wrong?"

"The police just called. They're getting reports of 'monster attacks,' which is code for Weevils on the rampage. And Ianto is still off taking care of our facehugger friend." Gwen ran a hand through her hair and looked toward the armory. "Rounding up Weevils is at least a two-man job. Three, without Jack."

John Hart leaned further back in the chair, feet propped on the edge of Toshiko's workstation. The temporal anchor blinked conspicuously on his ankle. "Anything I can help with?" he drawled.

Gwen turned to stare at him. "You actually _want_ to hunt Weevils?"

"I don't know what a Weevil is, but it's got to be more exciting than sitting around here all day. Especially now that you've banished me from the bar." Hart tossed a ball made of rubber bands in the air and caught it. "You won't let me play with any of the fun toys, and there's nothing more I can do to help Jamiya until she finishes tracing that signal. I'm bored."

Gwen watched him thoughtfully. "It's dangerous," she warned. "Weevils are nasty fighters. Their bites can be fatal."

"How do you usually hunt them?"

"Well, Jack usually takes the brunt of the attacks, since he's…" Gwen caught herself and glanced at Jamiya, who had turned sharply at her words. As far as Gwen knew, nobody had informed Jack's mother about his immortality, and she had to assume Jack wanted it that way. "…he's… so skilled at close-quarters combat," she finished. "He's the only one who can wrestle a Weevil and survive the experience."

Hart had followed her glance, and seemed to take her meaning. "Well, I'm not so bad at wrestling, myself," he replied with a saucy wink. "And I'm always looking to meet new species. You never know—it could be the start of something beautiful."

Gwen's lip curled. "I wish I could believe you were kidding." She unlocked the weapons store and armed herself with a second pistol and a stun gun. "But there's no one else, and I guess beggars can't be choosers. Come on, then." She retrieved several cans of Weevil spray from the combat supply and tossed one to Hart.

"What's this?" He sniffed the can tentatively.

"The latest cologne," Gwen snapped, leading the way to the garage where the SUV was parked. "Guaranteed to keep Weevils from getting too fresh on the first date."

"More's the pity," Hart quipped, but followed her into the tunnel.


	11. Chapter 11

Ianto stared in disbelief at the scene of chaos and destruction before him. "You did _what?_"

"What was I supposed to do, Ianto?" Gwen snapped. The shackled Weevil beside her tried to twist away, knocking a stack of file folders off the corner of a desk, and Gwen sprayed it aggressively with the Weevil spray until it stopped squirming. "Wait until you got back? There were _four _of them wreaking havoc on Castle Street, in broad daylight! Hart was my only option."

"And then you brought them _all_ in here?"

"They woke up on the way back to the Hub, and we couldn't take just one out without risking the others completely destroying the SUV, so we had to bring them all in at once."

Ianto didn't respond to that. He wondered distantly if that was because he couldn't think of a response, or if he was just so far beyond exhaustion that he no longer cared. He couldn't remember the last night he'd slept more than two hours. For that matter, he might just be hallucinating this entire disaster…

John Hart appeared then, coming from the direction of the vaults, which convinced Ianto that the disaster was every bit as real as his eyes told him. Hart wiped a hand across his bleeding mouth and beckoned for the Weevil Gwen was restraining. "Last one," he panted. "Please tell me you have another stash of liquor somewhere in this dump. I emptied Jack's, and I'm going to need a stiff drink or twelve after this."

"You and me both," Gwen muttered. "I'll follow you down; I need to set the lock codes, anyway."

When they'd gone, Ianto retrieved a bin liner and began collecting the debris that was the byproduct of transporting four conscious Weevils through the Hub. Anything that had been within reach of one of the creatures had been knocked over or destroyed. Shredded papers, bits of food packaging, and chunks of dried mud littered the floor. One of Jack's books had a corner missing and teeth marks in the cover. Ianto didn't even know where the pillow had come from, but tiny puffs of fiberfill were still floating through the air, drifting on the currents from the Hub's ventilation systems. The pillow's fabric shell lay like a drowned corpse in one of the tidal pools a level below the walkway, its fluffy white innards spilling into the water.

As his hands mechanically moved refuse from floor to bag, Ianto's thoughts turned inward. He could scarcely believe this was happening. _Any_ of it. They were besieged by unstoppable alien parasites while Weevils ran rampant in the city. Gwen had turned to John Hart, the man who had betrayed them all and indirectly killed Toshiko and Owen, for help. And Jack was gone, God only knew where, and they had no way of knowing if he'd ever return…

Ianto tried to grasp a piece of drifting fluff, but it slipped through his fingers. He tried again, and again, until he realized he could no longer see it through the tears in his eyes. _Jack__…_

A warm hand closed on his, and he gasped as he jerked upright. Blinking his vision clear, he found Jamiya Thane giving him a sympathetic smile.

"Let me help," she said, gently prising the bag from his fingers.

Ianto shook his head and tightened his grip on the plastic. "It's my job to clean up." _I need this. I need something to do_. Exhausted as he was, he still felt the drive to bury himself in work, keep himself too busy to think…

She looked at him with such understanding that his throat tightened in another sob, and it was all he could do to breathe evenly. "After I lost Gray and Franklin—my husband—I felt unspeakably alone," she said quietly, bending to collect the torn remains of that morning's pastry box from the floor. "I had Javic, of course, but he was just a child, and he'd lost his father and brother. He needed me to be strong. I couldn't show him how scared or lost I really was." She tucked the scraps of paperboard into the bag that Ianto still held and moved to collect more rubbish. "I struggled and struggled on my own until I truly thought I couldn't face another day. And do you know what happened then?"

Ianto tried to speak, but words wouldn't come. He mutely shook his head.

"Javic found a litter of orphaned pittles." She held up the small ball of pillow stuffing she'd gathered. "Little fuzzy creatures, no bigger than this. He went around the settlement and tried to find them homes, but there was one left over that no one would take, and naturally that one ended up coming home with him."

Ianto envisioned child-Jack going door to door with an armload of kittens, asking strangers to take them in, and he smiled in spite of the burn in his throat. Jack had always had a soft spot for society's orphans.

"At first I resented it. I couldn't bear to have one more thing depending on me. But one day, when it all got to be too much, that pittle was sitting on my bed staring at me, and I just… started talking to it. Telling it everything I couldn't tell anyone else. Everything I was afraid of, all the pain I was in, everything I'd kept inside all those months. And somehow, it helped. The more I talked, the more I began to _understand_ what I had been going through. I had to think about it, put it into words, before I could really begin to deal with the grief and the loneliness."

Ianto swallowed. "Why are you telling me all this?"

Jamiya smiled in that gentle, knowing way that instantly made him regret pretending he didn't understand. "I realize we've only just met. You may think it presumptuous of me to speak of such things. But I can see how much you care for my son, and I know that he cares for you. That makes your wellbeing of great importance to me." She placed a hand on his arm. "I know what it's like to have your loved ones torn away suddenly. I also know how those emotions can strangle you when they're kept bottled up inside, and you strike me as someone who doesn't uncork very easily."

"I'm fine," he lied, as though his eyes weren't still moist from tears. "Really. We deal with this sort of thing all the time." Her expression turned to frank disbelief, so he added, "Besides, I really can't share any of this with anyone outside of Torchwood. What we do here… it's meant to be secret." _Even if it seems the whole city knows about us_, he admitted silently.

"You don't need to tell a person. That pittle didn't understand a word I said, but it helped _me_ a great deal to say it aloud. Maybe it would help you, too."

Ianto couldn't meet the understanding in her eyes, so he looked down at the bag of rubbish. "Are you suggesting I adopt a cat?"

"Don't take on anything you don't have the time or energy to care for. But you should find someone—some_thing_ to confide in, Ianto. It will help. I promise."

Ianto nodded, and with a final, compassionate squeeze of his hand, Jamiya returned to her computer terminal and left him to his solitary thoughts.

* * *

Jack snapped awake, every danger sense he possessed tingling. His eyes skimmed the interior of the burned-out ship, but the bright sun and stark shadows made it impossible to see much. He lowered his jaw slightly to open his ears and listened hard.

_There_. Over the whistling of the wind through sandblasted metal, he heard the sound again. A soft skittering noise, almost like the claws of a rodent, lasting no more than a second. He waited and listened.

When he'd jerked back to life after the last fall, Jack had dashed the last hundred meters to the shelter of the wreckage, not caring what dangers it housed so long as it was out of the sun. The ship had turned out to be some kind of crashed cargo transport, a lozenge-shaped metal vessel about the length of a rail car and twice as wide. One side had been sheared away in the crash, leaving the interior exposed to the sun and sand.

His first thought had been to find emergency supplies, but the ship's water reservoir had eroded and cracked in the harsh desert conditions. Next he'd performed a cursory search of the cargo, but the containers held only small machinery parts and metal hardware. Jack's surge of hope at discovering that the old ship had been retrofitted with a transmat vanished almost as soon as it flared: The transmat mechanism had evidently been damaged in the crash, as well. A small cargo container was wedged in the cubicle, half-transported. Its lower half was missing, but the upper portion was locked in stasis, eternally awaiting disintegration. Even if Jack could find a way to restore power to the system, he knew there was no way to purge the residual matter from the teleporation matrix and make it usable again. There was a reason any transmat that froze mid-transfer was automatically scrapped.

Already feeling weak from his sprint to reach shelter, Jack had tucked himself into a semi-dark corner and waited for heat and dehydration to kill him again. He must have dozed off then, because now he found himself in the same position, woozy but still alive.

And definitely not alone.

Jack slid down from his perch atop a shipping crate and eased toward the back of the vessel. He'd been focused solely on the cargo containers during his quick search of the ship, and hadn't bothered to excavate the sand down to the floor. It was possible that some other life form had taken shelter here. Even on Earth, desert creatures were often venomous, and there was no telling what dangers lurked on this alien planet. He wondered if a life form that could survive in these conditions might be looking to eat him. Then he wondered, just as quickly, if he could eat _it_. If he didn't find some sustenance soon, he would be literal dead meat in a very short time.

As he reached the far wall, he heard the scratching again. The curved walls of the ship made it difficult to locate the source of the sound, but he decided the sand was too soft to create the noise he'd heard. He glanced up just in time to see a hand-like form scuttle away into a shadow.

Jack swore aloud. Of course the alien parasites would be here—he'd fallen through the same rift portal they had, only in the opposite direction. This was the place they had come from. And knowing what he did about them…

Keeping an eye on the ceiling, Jack bolted for the hole in the side of the ship. Given the choice between dying of heat exhaustion or having his brain liquefied by a facehugger, he'd take his chances with the elements.

He'd made it to within two strides of the door when his foot hooked on something buried in the sand. He pitched forward, too dizzy with heat to right himself, and his head struck the metal door frame with his full weight behind it.

An instant before his vision went black, a thought flashed through his mind: _At least this time, it won__'t be the heat that kills me_.


	12. Chapter 12

"I know I shouldn't let it bother me as much as it does," Ianto sighed. "Gwen's right; it's not as though we have much of a choice. And to be fair, Hart does seem to be trying his best to behave." He gave a wry chuckle. "Though he knows what will happen if he doesn't. Now that he's spent some time around Janet and her relations, I'm sure he's even more anxious to stay out of the vaults." He settled back in the hard plastic chair, the protective suit crinkling around him. "I don't like to admit it, but we wouldn't be able to accomplish much without his help. Not as short-staffed as we are. Not as long as Jack is still missing…"

He trailed off, his eyes unfocusing as he gazed at the far wall. "It's been two weeks now," he said softly. If he concentrated very hard, he could keep the tremor out of his voice. "No word yet. No sign. Nothing."

The man on the gurney lay completely still, save for the shallow respiration that lifted his chest a few times each minute. The eerie hum of the medical monitors and other equipment hooked up to him and his alien parasite filled the silence. It was uncomfortable not for the presence of the emaciated body or the alien, Ianto decided, but because it was too hospital-like. It reminded him too much of those last days visiting his ailing father in the nursing home, or of his mother's last weeks in the oncology ward…

Tears pricked his eyes, and Ianto hurriedly blinked them into oblivion. With the protective mask over his face, he couldn't wipe them away, and he didn't wish for the Flat Holm nurses to see how emotionally compromised he was. After all, he'd told them he was only here to evaluate the patient and take some further readings, not to unburden himself in some kind of one-sided therapy session.

Ianto had doubted the value of Jamiya's advice at first—how much could saying things aloud really help?—but he'd finally given it a try, primarily in the hope that spending some time with the facehugger victim might improve his condition, the way coma patients' brains were said to respond to conversation. Now that he'd tried it, he could see some merit in verbalizing his struggles. Ianto wasn't much of a talker under normal circumstances, and with his best friend indefinitely absent, he'd had no outlet at all. Talking to the patient allowed him to vent a little of his stress and frustration, so he didn't explode _every_ time John Hart pushed his buttons.

While it might be helping Ianto, though, it didn't seem to be doing much for the recipient of his monologue. The wounds on the skeletal body showed no sign of healing; if anything, they looked worse than they had when Jack had discovered the man lying in the weeds. A clump of thin blond hair lay on the paper pillow cover beside his head. Ianto knew that hair loss was a consequence of ongoing malnutrition, which was certainly one of many things the man was suffering from, but it didn't bode well for the patient's recovery. Ianto tried to pick up the lock of hair, but his fingers had little dexterity in the thick gloves, and he only succeeded in scattering the brittle strands across the bedding.

With a sigh, Ianto rose and entered the clean room's airlock, where the automated system sprayed down his suit to sterilize it before releasing the door mechanism. He squirmed out of the suit and hung it in the rack to be fully decontaminated, then stepped out to find Helen in the corridor.

"No change, I assume?" Helen asked. Ianto shook his head. "I didn't anticipate any," she continued, "but of course we need to track any potential factors that may affect the creature, including the presence of new people and sounds. Did you get your readings all right?"

Ianto stared blankly for a few seconds before recalling his cover story. "Oh, yes," he temporized. "Everything went as planned. I'll… let you know if I learn anything."

Helen nodded, and her eyes slid past Ianto's shoulder to the airlock. "Poor bloke," she sighed. "I don't suppose there's anything more we can do for him. We've tried everything we can think of to detach that creature, but every time we probe or test it, it just digs in deeper. I finally made the decision to just leave it alone and observe it, so we know what to expect if any more victims turn up. If it detaches on its own and we can capture it alive, of course, we can do a lot more intensive testing. In any case, it's contained, so in the worst case, we can decontaminate or seal off the room."

Ianto looked back through the airlock, where the outline of the comatose patient was barely visible through the glass. "Hopefully it won't come to that."

* * *

Silence followed Ianto back across the bay, into the sheltered dock where the Torchwood boat berthed, through the connecting tunnel, and down the lift into the Hub.

Ianto stood for a moment, listening to the soft trickling of water down the tower that housed the rift manipulator. He would not have thought he'd have missed all the noise and chaos that the Hub had once housed: Owen skiving off instead of working, Suzie grinding away at some project with a power saw, Toshiko fiddling with noisy bits of technology, Gwen laughing at one of Jack's terrible jokes… Now the near-silence was heavy and oppressive.

He shook off the stillness and climbed the stairs to where Jamiya's station, once Toshiko's, sat. Jack's mother had adopted the desk and monitors as her base of operations, and while a part of Ianto still expected to see Toshiko smiling back at him and her complex projects spread around all horizontal surfaces, he was gradually growing accustomed to the sight of a middle-aged woman with Jack's smile greeting him when he entered.

"Welcome back," Jamiya called when she noticed him. "Did you have a productive trip?"

"Moderately. Anything new?"

"Yes, actually." She flashed a tentative smile. "I accessed the atmospheric data from the subspace traffic beacons in the outer galactic quadrants, and cross-referenced that with the radiation that has been coming through the small portals behind Morrie's. I think I've managed to triangulate a location."

Ianto had been walking past on his way to Jack's office, but now he whirled around to stare at her. "You know where he is?"

"I think I know where he _went_. It's not exactly the same thing." She bit her lip. "And… I'm reasonably certain he isn't there _now_."

"But he was there?"

"Yes. A long time ago."

"Oh." Ianto deflated a little as her meaning sank in. "How long ago?"

"It's difficult to calculate with any degree of precision. I'm hoping Yolan can help me narrow it down further. Time travel technology really isn't my area of expertise, but he might know how to refine the parameters." She gestured to the two gutted vortex manipulators that lay scattered in pieces across the desktop, connected by bits of wire and odd metal attachments.

"Where is our dear Captain Hart?" Ianto tried to recall if he'd seen Gwen's car when he'd passed through the garage prior to leaving for Flat Holm. Out of habit, they had been taking their own vehicles out on calls instead of the SUV, which was still in the deepest level of the underground garage. Ianto was accustomed to leaving it behind for Jack to drive. Jack loved driving the hulking black vehicle, with its showy lights, roof dish, and gadgets crammed into the dashboard like it was some kind of spacecraft. Ianto had often teased him about it, asking if he found it nostalgic…

"They went out on a call from the local police," Jamiya answered, distracting him before he could become too lost in memories. "Gwen said something about a missing person. I expect them back any time."

"I'll put the coffee on, then. It's nearly tea time." Glad for something to occupy him, Ianto went to the kitchenette and began washing out the mugs that had accumulated beside the sink. His, and Gwen's, and two new ones he'd purchased when it became apparent that Jamiya and John Hart were not just in town for a short visit.

Jack's mug, white with four blue stripes, sat above the coffee machine beside Toshiko's pale blue mug and Owen's red one. Owen's had been the first to be placed in storage; he hadn't drunk any coffee the last few weeks of his life. Or undeath. Whatever Owen had been, before the radiation destroyed his body.

Ianto shook that thought out of his head and scrubbed at a stubborn lipstick stain on the rim of Gwen's mug. It was no good dwelling on the past, on what he'd lost. He had to focus on what he could do to help keep Torchwood running. On what he could contribute to the effort to bring Jack back.

And just now, what he could contribute seemed limited to caffeine. He scrubbed harder.

The cog door rolled back with blaring alarms and flashing lights, and Gwen and Hart entered. "We're back," Gwen called, as though her voice could reach farther than the door alarms.

"Anything interesting?" Ianto called without leaving the coffee machine.

Gwen dropped her purse and keys on her desk. "Missing person. Dafad Thomas. Last seen a little over two weeks ago. Left behind an ex-wife and a two-year-old son. He was fired from his job for missing two shifts in a row without calling in, but it wasn't the first time he'd skipped work, so his boss didn't think it was worth reporting. Nobody realized he was _actually_ missing until this week, when he didn't make his usual child support payment."

"And this is worthy of Torchwood's time… why?"

Gwen slipped a snapshot out of her purse and carried it over to show Ianto. "Take a look."

The picture showed a pudgy, thirty-ish man in T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms, standing beside a woman with a baby in her arms. Ianto shook his head. "No one here looks familiar."

Gwen tapped the man's shirt, emblazoned with a sports logo. "Apparently he was a big Wrexham fan. He was last seen alive two days before our first facehugger victim's body was discovered, wearing this same Red Dragons shirt. And the job he was fired from? He was a cook at Morrie's."

"Ah. Well, that's our first mystery victim identified, then," Ianto sighed. "Any clue as to our second?"

"Nothing yet, though the police have been notified to forward us any reports that match his description. I spoke with the staff at Morrie's, and they say there are a few regulars they haven't seen for a couple of weeks, though that's not conclusive." Gwen nodded suggestively toward the coffee machine. "I don't suppose that's ready for consumption?"

"Patience," he chided. "The water's just got up to temperature." He started a cup of tea for Jamiya, who had decided she preferred the milder flavor over coffee, and set a few biscuits on a plate. "How did Hart behave on your outing?"

"Like an angel. He stood quietly, let me do all the talking, and didn't even make any lewd remarks."

Ianto glanced across the Hub to where Hart was chatting with Jamiya. "That's… somewhat terrifying."

"I know. He's definitely up to something." Gwen followed Ianto's look. "I just wish I knew what."

"Well, as long as he behaves himself, we might as well make use of his unique set of abilities." Ianto decanted coffee into Gwen's mug. "We can certainly use the extra manpower."

"And it's not as though he's good for anything else." Gwen reached across and helped herself to a biscuit. "Odd as it sounds, John Hart is perhaps the only person I've ever met who was perfectly suited for Torchwood's heavy lifting. Skilled at combat, knowledgeable about aliens, totally fearless…"

"And completely, one-hundred-percent expendable," Ianto finished.

Gwen saluted that sentiment with her mug. "Cheers."

* * *

_Jack._

He was deep in the darkness again, but this time it wasn't the _wrongness_ he usually felt when being dragged back to life. There was pain, but it was a dull throbbing in his temple, not the razor gauntlet of resurrection.

_Jack_. That was… a voice, calling to him. A voice he knew? The darkness thinned, sensory awareness returning. Hard metal grating pressed against his back. His skin was burning all over, but his head burned more than the rest. No—was it burning, or was it cold? Fire and ice could feel nearly the same at extremes, nerves incapable of distinguishing anything beyond the risk of damage…

"Jack!" This time there was no mistaking the sound, nor the light slap of a hand against his cheek. Jack's eyes snapped open, admitting a soft orange light, blessedly dim after the glare of the desert sun. Bent over him, silhouetted against the light, was…

"Doctor?" Jack rasped, blinking his vision into focus. "What… how…"

The Doctor rocked back on his heels, looking relieved. "There you are! I thought you weren't going to wake up, for a minute there. You've had a nasty knock on the head. Who gave you that, then? Jealous husband?" He cocked an eyebrow. "Jealous wife?"

Jack lifted a hand to his throbbing forehead and found a cold medipack pressed against a swollen area there. He hissed in pain and removed the medipack before sitting up. Nausea and vertigo assailed him, confirming that he had a concussion, at least. "I fell," he managed when the world stopped spinning. "I was running… hit the wall." He probed the lump on his head; it was the size of an egg. "Surprised that didn't kill me."

"Probably would have, if you weren't… whatever you are. You sustained a small linear fracture of the skull." The Doctor twirled his sonic screwdriver, which Jack could only assume had aided in the diagnosis, before tucking it back inside his pinstriped suit jacket. "Do you feel up to standing?"

Jack didn't, really, but he knew his accelerated healing would set in soon. He allowed the Doctor to help him to his feet, then over to one of the padded seats that surrounded the TARDIS control console when it became clear his sense of balance was still out to lunch. "How did you find me? What are you doing on… actually, where are we?"

"Metoklactis Five," the Doctor answered, swiveling a screen toward him to show the relevant star chart. "As to how I found you, well, the TARDIS did that. Pulled right off course and landed in the desert. She must have sensed something wrong in space-time and detoured me there to fix it."

"Something… wrong?" Jack shot the Doctor a look.

The Doctor rolled his eyes. "Are you _ever_ going to stop reminding me I said that? How many times must I apologize?" He shook his head. "Anyway, I don't mean you. I mean the portals. Tiny rifts in space, opening and closing all over the planet's surface. You must have picked them up on your…" He blinked suddenly, then seemed to take stock of Jack from head to foot. "Hang on, where's your vortex manipulator? And the rest of your clothes, for that matter? I haven't seen you this dressed down since…"

"…You abandoned me on Satellite Five," Jack finished, with an even darker look.

The Doctor scowled back at him. "That wasn't really _me_, you know. You can hardly blame me for everything my previous regenerations have done."

"I'd be more likely to buy that if you hadn't tried to run away from me the moment we met again."

The Doctor's brow furrowed. "I thought we'd moved past all that. We talked, remember? I even invited you to stay on."

"Yeah," Jack sighed. "You did, and I'm over it."

"You don't sound over it."

"It's been a rough day, okay?" Jack pushed himself experimentally to his feet. His equilibrium seemed to be returning, if not his equanimity. "To answer your question, I left my base in a bit of a hurry. Got sucked through one of those tiny portals you mentioned, and landed in the desert where you found me."

"How long were you there?"

Jack shrugged. "Long enough to die of exposure three or four times."

"You look it." The Doctor gestured to Jack's arms. Looking down, Jack saw the deep redness he hadn't fully noticed before. That explained the all-over burning sensation, at least. "Why don't you run down to medical and put some salve on those burns? I know you heal fast, but that's painful just to look at. Probably find something for your head in there, too."

"I think I will. Is it in the same place, or have you moved things around?"

The Doctor screwed up his face in concentration. "She's remodeled herself a bit, but I think it's the sixth door on the left, just past the ice cream parlor. No—on the right. Definitely on the right."

"I'll find it." Jack grinned. "Maybe even stop in for an ice cream on the way back."

As he made his way down the familiar ancient-yet-new corridors of the TARDIS, he reached out to trace his fingers along one wall. "Hello, old girl," he murmured fondly. "Miss me?" He lowered his mental shields to allow the ship's telepathic response to purr gently in his mind. _Me, too_, he thought back. _Glad you__'re not trying to shake me off this time. Guess you warmed up to me after I broke you out of that paradox engine, huh?_

The ship did not answer, but when Jack reached the medical facility, he found a jar of burn salve and a dose of paracetamol already waiting for him.


	13. Chapter 13

"So," John Hart drawled, swinging a leg across a chair, "who called this team meeting?"

"Just _a_ meeting." Ianto planted Hart's coffee mug firmly on the desk beside him. "Some of you aren't on the official team roster."

"Who ionized your sunshine?" Hart scowled up at him. "Fine, who summoned the Torchwood slave-drivers and their captives?"

"I did." Jamiya thanked Ianto for her cup of tea and brought up some kind of graph on the display screen over her desk. "I think I've managed to locate Jack."

Gwen nearly choked on her coffee, and she coughed and spluttered for a few seconds. "What? Why didn't you say so sooner?"

"Because I've only just managed to track his signal, and I'm not even sure if I'm right. It's far from an exact science, and I'll still need Yolan's help to narrow down when he is."

"When? You mean he's traveled in time, as well?" Gwen mopped coffee from her chin and frowned at a spreading stain on the front of her blouse.

"Most likely. The rift opens tunnels in space and time, like… wormholes, I think you'd call them. It would be even more surprising if he had stayed in this time."

John Hart swiveled to face the screen and spent a minute or two looking over her readings. Occasionally he touched something on the disassembled control panel of his wrist strap. "From the delay on that beacon data, I'd say he's traveled back two hundred, maybe closer to three hundred years. I can't get a tighter read without a fixed reference point."

Ianto flinched at the words _fixed point_. "So he's definitely in the past, then?"

"Seems like it."

Ianto breathed a little sigh of relief. "Well, at least that's good news."

"Is it?" Gwen frowned. "Why? If he's far away—wait, where is he?"

"On the opposite side of the galaxy, approximately," Jamiya answered.

"So, if he's far away and in a different time, why is that good news?"

"Because he's in the past," Ianto said. "Because he has two hundred years to find a way back to us."

Jamiya frowned at him. "What do you mean, find a way back to you? Even if he can find a way to travel through space, he'd need specialized technology to travel in time. We can't open a portal through the rift to bring him back, not without more complete data."

Gwen shot Ianto a warning glance, and Ianto froze. In his relief, he'd forgotten that Jamiya still hadn't been told about Jack's special circumstances. "I only meant… it's easier to go forward in time than back," he stammered. "Like swimming with the tide, rather than against it."

Jamiya shook her head patiently. "That isn't the way it works, Ianto. Any time someone or something moves through the matrix of time, you need special equipment. For Jack to get back to us, he'd need something that can transport him safely through the vortex, like a time ship. Or one of these." She tapped the wrist straps.

"Right," Ianto said quickly. "You're right. My mistake."

He glanced apologetically at Gwen, and even Hart rolled his eyes. Jamiya didn't miss the unspoken communication. "Unless there's something you're not telling me."

Ianto swallowed, but didn't trust himself to speak. Gwen tried to look innocent and failed. It was John Hart who at last sighed. "There is, Jamiya. These two don't want you to know, which I'm guessing means Jack didn't want you to know. But nobody told _me _not to tell you, and even if they had, I wouldn't listen because I think you deserve to know."

"What?" Jamiya's face paled. "What is it?"

"John, don't," Gwen warned. "You can't tell her!"

"Please," Ianto added. "Jack would want to tell her himself."

"Well Jack isn't here, is he?" Hart snapped. "And if you hadn't noticed, Jackie boy isn't exactly forthcoming with information. She'd never have known about Gray if I hadn't told her. Hell, she wouldn't even have known Jack was alive if I hadn't told her!"

"It's not your secret to share!"

"It is now. I'm the closest thing to family he's got outside of Jamiya, and if I think—"

He never finished the sentence, because Ianto's fist connected with his jaw and sent him flying. Hart caught himself on the chain railing and nearly toppled over into the tidal pools a level below.

"Enough!" Jamiya shouted, surging to her feet and placing herself between Ianto and John Hart. "Any time there's a disagreement, you people all resort to violence! I'm starting to wonder if the stories about our barbaric human ancestors were true after all, and the history books just missed the era by a few millennia." She put her hands on her hips and turned to glare at Ianto. "Now someone had better tell me what's going on here. Whether or not you believe I have the right to know my son's secrets—and I'll remind you that he is _my son_—I need to know all the variables if I'm to make a successful estimate of where and how far he's gone, and what our chances are of getting him back. I'm an engineer. I need all the data to do my work. So someone, any one of you, _talk!_"

For a moment, the only sound was the trickling of water down the tower. John Hart pulled himself upright and rubbed at his split lip, shooting Ianto a deadly glare. Gwen shifted her gaze around, at last fixing it apologetically on Ianto.

Ianto sighed. He might have guessed it would fall to him. Jamiya was already staring at him expectantly.

"Jack is…" he faltered at the word _immortal_. "He doesn't age," he said instead.

Jamiya frowned. "I don't understand. What do you mean, he doesn't age?"

"I mean he's… in effect, he's timeless. He stays the same no matter how much time passes."

"I've seen him age. I watched him grow up."

"It happened later, after he was…" Ianto shook his head. "I really can't explain. But he looks around thirty-six, thirty-eight, something like that." He drew a deep breath. "He's looked that way for over a hundred years."

Jamiya stared at him. She looked at Hart, then at Gwen, then back to Ianto. "Over a hundred years," she echoed faintly. "Are you trying to tell me that my son is older than I am?"

"He's a lot older than that," John Hart said. He actually looked apologetic, in a way, and moved nearer to Jamiya as he spoke. "He's immortal. And I happen to know he's well over two thousand years old, because I saw him … Well." He shook his head. "I won't tell you about that. But he can't die, no matter what happens to him."

"Can't… die? Immortal?" Jamiya laughed, though there was an hysterical edge to it. "What are you talking about? Everyone dies."

"Jack dies," Gwen said, "but he comes back to life. He can't stay dead."

"I've seen it," Hart confirmed. "I watched him fall off a building and… he was dead. I checked."

"Because you threw him off the roof," Ianto muttered, then turned back to Jamiya. "But Hart's right. He just comes back to life. His body regenerates."

"I don't believe you. I _can__'t_ believe you." Jamiya shook her head stubbornly.

"It's true."

"But it's not possible! What could make something like that happen?"

Hart and Gwen both looked at Ianto, who shrugged helplessly. "I don't know the mechanics of it. I know it happened in the future—the far, far future. Much farther than where you're from. But Jack would never give me details. I don't think he liked remembering it."

"So you're saying my son will… what, will live forever?" Jamiya sounded faint.

"There's no way of knowing, I suppose." Hart squeezed her shoulder. "We know old age and injury can't hurt him."

"Neither can illness," Gwen put in. "He recovers from diseases, even fatal ones. Poison, too."

"And that's why I said what I did about the past," Ianto said gently, kneeling beside Jamiya's chair. "If he's in the past, Jack can catch up to us. He'll know where we are, and there's a chance he can find his way back here."

Jamiya took a few deep breaths. "If that's the case, then why isn't he here already?"

"Well, it's possible that he doesn't know the exact date he went missing. Or that it's taking him longer than planned to get here."

"Transportation out there isn't exactly reliable in this century," Hart pointed out. "Hell, it's not even reliable in our century. And that's assuming he landed on a planet or something, and not just out in deep space somewhere." He frowned thoughtfully. "Huh. I wonder if he can survive total depressurization. Have you ever put him in vacuum to see what happens?"

Gwen smacked Hart hard in the shoulder before turning to Jamiya. "Even if he got to Earth in the right century, it might take him some time to get to Cardiff. If he's stuck somewhere with no money, no passport… Does Jack even _have_ a passport, Ianto?"

"Not that I know of. He's never needed one. Doesn't have a driver's license, either. I suppose if he could get in contact with UNIT, they'd put him in touch with us. Or Martha, if nothing else."

"What about Jack's Doctor?" Gwen put in suddenly. "Martha knows him, doesn't she? Do you suppose she could get in touch with him? Maybe he could help somehow."

Ianto nodded thoughtfully. "If we could get a message to him, he might be able to go look for Jack. Maybe even take one of us with him…" He trailed off, recalling the brief glimpse of the blue Police Box he'd caught at Canary Wharf. He'd planned to go explore the storage area with Lisa on their lunch break, the day all hell broke loose. He suppressed the involuntary shudder and tore his mind away from the memories of blood and death and fire. "Or we could just ask him to drop Jack off," he added quickly. "No point in making it more complicated than necessary, after all."

"Wait, who is this doctor you're talking about?" Jamiya looked around the group helplessly. "What's he got to do with… with anything?"

"The Doctor is an old friend of Jack's," Gwen said.

"The Doctor is the reason Torchwood was founded," Ianto said at almost the same moment.

Gwen turned and stared at him. "What?"

Ianto stared back. "What do you mean, what?"

"The Doctor? Torchwood? What are you on about?"

Ianto's jaw fell open. "You didn't know?"

"Know what?"

"About the Torchwood initiative? The original charter from Queen Victoria?"

"What charter?"

Ianto sighed deeply. "I might have known nobody read the information packets I compiled. The Doctor is an alien, Jamiya. A time-traveling one. Torchwood, and later the Torchwood Institute, were founded to keep him from interfering in Earth's history. Well, with the British Empire, at least."

"And this time-traveling alien is a friend of Jack's?"

Ianto nodded. "They used to travel together. Had their ups and downs, but they last parted on good terms, from what I heard."

"Well, while you're catching up with more of Jack's old pals," Hart interrupted, "I'll keep working here. I think I might be able to rig something to pinpoint his location a little more accurately. I'll, uh, just need a few of these components. And a screwdriver." He collected the scattered remains of Jack's vortex manipulator and stood. "I'll find a quiet spot downstairs to work. Jamiya, I'll let you know when I have something useful."

Ianto watched Hart leave. When he glanced at Gwen, he saw his own frown mirrored on her face.

_What is he up to?_ Gwen mouthed.

Ianto just shook his head. He'd worry about John Hart's motives once Jack was safely home again.


	14. Chapter 14

"So," said Jack.

The Doctor leaned around the console and quirked one of his mobile eyebrows, but did not answer.

"It's awfully quiet around here," Jack continued.

This time the pinstriped shoulders raised and lowered in a shrug. "Quiet can be good, now and again. Time for reflection, and all that."

Jack shot him a suspicious look. "Yeah, and with you that usually lasts only until you see something shiny, and the trouble and the running-for-your-life starts all over again. Besides, I thought you liked being around people. Why are you alone?"

The Doctor glanced down and poked at a few buttons. "Been traveling on my own for a while now."

Jack wondered if he were meant to see the loneliness, or if the Doctor actually thought he was fooling anyone. "Nobody new since… what's her name? The one that got part of your regeneration. Donna, wasn't it?"

The Doctor's expression faltered at the mention of his last companion, but he concealed it quickly. "Nope. Just wandering the universe with the old girl, seeing the sights." He patted the TARDIS console fondly.

Jack gave a snort. "I give it another week."

"What?"

"Until you can't stand not having someone around to show off how clever you are. You _love_ an audience."

The Doctor managed to look affronted, though Jack could see he'd hit the mark. "You make me sound like some kind of… of… street performer!"

"Galactic rodeo cowboy, more like."

"Says a man who makes Liberace look like a stealth operative," the Doctor retorted.

"Hey! I don't wear sequins!"

"You'd blind the universe if you did, given your love of the spotlight."

"All right, fine, so we're both showboaters." Jack plopped onto one of the faded yellow seats surrounding the console. "Keeping a low profile was never part of our M.O. anyway."

The Doctor chuckled. "Nope. Never was much good at that."

"But you really should find someone to take around with you. You're at your best when you have someone to look after. To keep you focused." Jack ran a finger along the rail that circled the control room and frowned at the smudge left behind. "To make you dust the place occasionally."

The Doctor shoved his hands in his pockets and paced halfway around the console. "It's not that simple. I don't want just _anyone_. I can't just pick a name out of the directory and find someone like Rose, or Martha, or Donna. They were special, all of them. Rare."

"Rare, maybe, but you found all three of them. And that's just within my lifetime."

The Doctor scowled. "Your lifetime is a lot longer than it sounds."

Jack rolled his eyes. "My point being, you have a knack for finding those people. And I'm sure there were plenty of others who traveled with you before I met you."

"There were. Many others." The Doctor sighed. "The problem is, they don't stay with me long enough. They _can__'t_ stay with me." His gaze went distant. "No one can."

"That, I understand," Jack said quietly.

Their eyes met, and they shared a moment of profound understanding before the Doctor cocked his head to one side. "What are you doing the rest of this week, Jack?"

"I'm not even sure what week it _is_. What time zone are we in?"

"Twenty-fourth century, give or take." The Doctor grinned. "Fancy a spin? After all this quiet reflection, I reckon I could use some excitement."

Jack considered the intense pressure he'd been under, the growing alien infestation in Cardiff, the looming questions of staffing Torchwood for the future. He had so many urgent crises waiting for him back in the twenty-first century.

But he was sitting in a time machine, and whether he made the return trip right away or in a week, relatively speaking, made little difference to his task list. "I _did_ just take a nasty knock on the head," he said thoughtfully. "I suppose it's only fair to allow myself a few days to recover."

The Doctor jabbed buttons and spun a few dials. "Then hold on to something," he advised. "_Allons-y!_"

* * *

"Welcome back," Jamiya called from the direction of the kitchenette. "Is it just you?"

Gwen followed the voice and spotted the older woman dunking a tea bag in a steaming mug—a startling sight, considering how rarely anyone managed to bypass Ianto's proprietary boundary long enough to prepare their own hot beverage. "Just me. John wanted some fresh air, so I told him he could take a walk before lunch. Where's Ianto got to?"

"He said something about checking on that alien victim."

"He's been doing that more and more often." Gwen frowned thoughtfully. "I wonder why _this_ one. There have been other victims of the rift before, but he's never spent this much time with any of them."

Jamiya deposited her soggy tea bag in the bin and made her way back to her desk. "Perhaps he just wants some peace and quiet. He doesn't exactly get on with Yolan. John," she corrected.

Gwen didn't seem to notice the slip. "Flat Holm isn't exactly where anyone would go for peace and quiet." Jamiya cocked her head in a visual question, and Gwen sighed. "It's a sort of… special hospital. Jack set it up to help people who were taken by the rift, who were too damaged by it to return to society. It's an awful place. Screaming, and sickness, and…" She shuddered. "The staff do their best to make the patients comfortable, but it's so _hopeless_. I hate it."

Jamiya's eyes were keen with understanding. "No. You hate that it's necessary."

Gwen blinked. "Well… yes. I suppose that's the root of it." She squinted at Jamiya. "How did you know that?"

"You're too kind-hearted to hate any place that exists to help people. Especially one that Jack created." She smiled triumphantly. "See? I'm learning."

Gwen laughed. "You're doing better than I would. Once I get a name in my head, it's stuck there. Half the time I can't even remember Banana Boat's real name."

"Banana Boat?"

"One of my husband's mates. He's had that daft name longer than I've known him. It suits him, though." Gwen yawned and dropped into the extra chair near Jamiya's workstation. "I hope Ianto gets back soon. I could do with a coffee."

Jamiya glanced at her mug of tea, then at the kitchenette. "Can't you just make it yourself?"

"And risk Ianto's wrath?" She shook her head. "Nobody touches Ianto's coffee machine. Not me, anyway. Jack can get away with it now and again, but he's got special privileges."

"Partner benefits?"

"That, and he paid for the coffee machine." Gwen screwed up her nose. "But Jack's coffee is rubbish. Don't tell him I said so, though."

Jamiya's smile turned wistful. "I hope I get the opportunity not to tell him. Any luck reaching that friend of his?"

Gwen shook her head. "I called UNIT again this morning, but they said she's still out of town on some top-secret project, and won't tell me how to reach her. Her mobile is either out of range or turned off. Or maybe Martha's just screening her calls."

"Screening?"

"Not picking up when she sees who's calling," Gwen explained. "She and Jack had a bit of a row last time she was here, so maybe she just doesn't want to hear from Torchwood."

A crease appeared between Jamiya's brows. "Does that happen often? I know he and John have had their differences…"

"John is a special case. Most people love Jack, they really do. Even Martha. It's just that… well, since Tosh and Owen died… it's been hard. For all of us, but especially for Jack. He felt responsible for them, since he was the one who recruited and trained them, and since he's our leader. And…"

"And since it was Gray who killed them." Jamiya sighed deeply. "He's always blamed himself for what happened to Gray."

"I didn't mean that," Gwen amended hastily. "Jack doesn't want to hire anyone new, so he's been taking more work on himself and pressuring people like Martha to pick up some of the slack. She finally put her foot down, and things escalated. I think everything will be fine once they both have a chance to cool down."

Jamiya nodded slowly. "That is, if we can get him back."

"Right. Of course. But we will, won't we?" Gwen smiled hopefully.

Jamiya returned the smile, but it was short-lived. She adjusted the wire plugged into a port on on one of the wrist straps, now mostly reassembled, and idly tapped a few keys on the keyboard. "I feel like I've run up against a wall. I've been over these readings time and again, but I can't glean anything new from them. And I can't run any new simulations without more comprehensive data."

Gwen's eyes flicked over the readouts on the screen, but the numbers and waveforms meant little to her. "What sort of data?"

"Readings on the portals, if I could get them. Frequency of oscillation when they appear and disappear. And you said they shimmered; I'd like to do a wavelength analysis. There could be infrared or solar radiation leaking through."

"If you went to the site, could you scan for those things using our equipment?"

Jamiya considered the piles of equipment scattered around the workstation, then nodded. "I think I could make some of this work."

"Well, come on then." Gwen pushed herself to her feet. "I'll drive you."

"Is it really all right to leave this place unattended?"

"As long as John Hart is locked outside." Gwen flashed her teeth. "It's fine, really. I'll forward the alerts to my mobile and lock up behind us. If Hart gets back before we do, he can cool his heels in one of the pubs up on the Plass. Probably chat up a waitress or a schnauzer or something. Besides, this will give me a chance to go buy a coffee."

Jamiya looked relieved. "I suppose it _would _be nice to see sunlight again. I've been down here for days."

"I can't promise clear skies," Gwen laughed. "This is Wales, after all."


	15. Chapter 15

Jamiya didn't look up as Gwen emerged from the back door of Morrie's, paper coffee cup in hand. The older woman was kneeling in the gravel, intent on scanning a space directly in front of her—a place Gwen recognized as the very spot where Jack had vanished.

Gwen shivered at the memory and sipped coffee through the slotted lid. It was scalding, but the heat helped conceal the stale, slightly burnt flavor. Whoever passed for a barista at Morrie's could take a few lessons from Ianto Jones.

"Any luck?" Gwen called when feeling had returned to her tongue.

"We'll see when I get back and analyze the data." Jamiya pushed herself to her feet, wincing as she straightened her legs. "I need to get outside more. It's been years since I did any field work, and it shows."

"Field work?" Gwen set her coffee on the edge of a skip bin and bent to collect the scanning equipment. "What sort of work did you do?"

"Generator maintenance, mainly." Jamiya held open the equipment bag while Gwen stowed the scanners. "I'm really trained as a kinetic systems engineer, but after the invasion there was a lot of mechanical damage, so I spent some time doing repairs on the turbines."

Gwen's eyes had gone wide. "Invasion?"

Jamiya smiled tightly. "Our colony was attacked," she said, eyes clouding. "That's when I lost my husband, and Gray…"

"I'm sorry," Gwen said quickly. "I didn't mean to make you remember something painful."

"It's all right. It was a long time ago." Jamiya zipped the bag and slung it over her shoulder. "I suppose we should be getting back."

Gwen glanced at the sky. Sunlight was beginning to bleed through a few cracks in the gray canopy. "There's no real hurry. The rain seems to be holding off, if you wanted to stop off anywhere else. See the city, or something."

"I wouldn't even know where to go. This is all completely foreign to me, like something out of a storybook."

"Don't you have cities where you're from?"

"Of course, but they don't look anything like this one. This is _antiquity_. Brick buildings? Internal combustion vehicles?" Jamiya shook her head. "It's all so archaic."

Gwen led the way back to the SUV. "So what's it like where you're from, then? All flying cars and telepathy?"

"Not too many flying cars," Jamiya laughed. "There's too much sand where I live. Matter repulsors burn so much energy trying to repel loose particulate, it's just not efficient. And there's not enough money in the entire Boeshane Peninsula to afford a true antigrav unit. You hear rumors about quintillionaires in the core systems with private antigrav vehicles, but I've never seen one, myself."

Gwen's jaw sagged. "You… you actually have flying cars? I mean, not _you_, personally, but… they exist?"

Jamiya stopped walking and stared at her. "Of course they exist. You think we mastered matter transport and time travel _before_ figuring out how to get a frame with a couple of seats to hover a meter off the ground?"

"I… I guess I never thought about it. I mean, I knew Jack was from the future, but I suppose I never pictured it as a literal _flying cars_ future. Now _that _sounds like something from a storybook." Gwen shook her head. "We must seem so backward to you. I mean, three thousand years ago on Earth, humans were just starting to figure out how to make steel. Rome hadn't even been founded yet. I can't imagine how primitive we must look, compared to your time."

"Oh, I don't know. Things certainly look different, and your technology is… well, primitive is a good word for it. But people really haven't changed all that much." Jamiya looked around at the squat concrete-block storefronts and dusty cars surrounding them. "It is strange, though, knowing this is where it all began. Earth. Home of the human race. By my time, we've been out among the stars for well over a thousand years. It's difficult to imagine all the humans in the universe being in one single place, all at the same time. I mean, somewhere on this planet, my own ancestors are walking around. Alive. Right now."

"Oh, that's brilliant!" Gwen grinned. "You could even meet them! You never know."

Jamiya laughed. "The odds against that are astronomical. Even in this time, there are billions of humans, aren't there?"

"True, but it could be anyone, couldn't it?" Gwen felt a bit lightheaded. "I wonder if Jack realizes he could end up being his own great-great-great-great… something grandfather?"

"Oh, I don't think there's much chance of that." Jamiya's smile softened. "He isn't likely to father a child with Ianto. Your technology has a long way to go before that can happen."

"Well, not with Ianto, obviously. But Jack isn't exactly…" Gwen caught herself and hesitated, searching for a more elegant end to the sentence than what she'd been thinking.

"Isn't what?" Jamiya frowned. "Faithful? Committed?"

"…Celibate," Gwen finished. "I mean, from the stories he tells, he's certainly been around. And around, and around."

"I rather had that impression from John," Jamiya said dryly. "Not that he shared details—thank goodness—but he isn't exactly subtle. I know the two of them were… well." She cleared her throat. "I don't dislike John, but I think Ianto is probably better for Jack, in a lot of ways."

Gwen nodded vigorously. "I think a lot of people would agree with you—including Jack."

* * *

When they arrived at the Hub, they found John Hart lounging against the locked door of the tourist entrance. Beside him on the decking was a large cardboard box.

Which was moving.

"What the hell?" Gwen drew up short, keys dangling from her hand. "_Please_ tell me you didn't dognap someone's Maltese."

"What's a Maltese?" Hart pushed away from the door and nudged the box with the toe of his boot. "This is a Tatarian wood strider. Found it in one of those big metal bins behind a pub. Pretty sure they're not supposed to be on your planet."

The box rocked back and forth, and Gwen could hear angry scrabbling inside. "Is it dangerous?"

"Nah. I bought it a whiskey and soda and made friends with it. It's probably just feeling the effects now. They have fast metabolisms, but they're prone to bad hangovers." He tucked the box under an arm. "Can we go inside now? I'm starving."

Gwen unlocked the door. "What, you didn't get lunch while you were at the pub?"

"Didn't have any money, and I figured if I robbed the place, Eye Candy would lock me up again."

"You just said you bought a whiskey and soda. If you didn't have money—"

"It would be more accurate to say that I, ah, traded services for a couple of drinks." He waggled his eyebrows. "Some currencies never go out of circulation."

Gwen groaned as she pressed the concealed button to open the Hub access door. "You know that's also illegal here, right?"

Hart shrugged. "Nobody complained. In fact, I'd say the bartender was pretty satisfied with her part of the transaction."

They reached the main Hub level, and Gwen began to help Jamiya unpack the scanners at her workstation. Hart immediately headed for the lower levels. "Oi! Where are you taking the wood strider?" Gwen called.

"I was going to put it with the other one." Hart paused. "Though I guess I need you to open the door. Unless you want to just give me the lock codes for the vault level?"

"What other one?"

Hart assumed a look of infinite patience. "The one next to where you locked me up," he said as though speaking to a small child. "They're social colony-builders. They prefer to live in groups. It's pretty cruel to lock one up on its own."

Gwen stared at the box in his arms. "You mean we already have one of those in the Hub?"

"That thing you've got in the plastic box in the cell next to mine?"

"The giant spider thing?" Gwen shuddered. "I didn't know what species it was."

"Well, now you do." Hart held up the box. "This guy's getting pretty agitated. We should get it in the room with its friend before it sobers up completely."

Just then the cog door rolled back, admitting Ianto, arms laden with carrier bags. "Welcome back, Ianto," Gwen called. "Would you mind going down to the vaults with John so he can put the new giant spider with its friend?"

Ianto faltered mid-stride, but recovered quickly. "I have the feeling I just walked into something mid-scene. Shall I go outside and retry my entrance?"

"Just earning my keep," Hart said, displaying the box. The scrabbling sounds were growing louder. "But seriously, this thing is getting angry."

"Just let me set down lunch." Ianto began divesting himself of the carrier bags. "Where is this spider going?"

"Tatarian wood strider," Hart corrected. He was staring lustfully at the bags of food. "What's for lunch?"

"Choice of fish and chips or chicken tikka. I stopped at the Bay Tavern for takeaway."

"Hey, that's where I found this guy!" Hart jumped as a fibrous appendage punctured the cardboard, narrowly missing his hand. "Whoa, okay, we can talk about it later. Can we move a bit faster?"

Ianto led the way to the vaults, Hart hurrying along behind him, and Gwen shook her head. "Never a dull moment," she muttered.

Jamiya chuckled. "I get the impression you people haven't seen a dull moment in years."

"I'm not sure I'd recognize one if I did." Gwen folded up the empty equipment bag and stowed it beneath a desk. "Anything else you need help with?"

"No, I'll just start this data transferring over. Hopefully it will tell me something new."

Gwen crossed to the kitchenette. "Do you have a food preference? I'm fine with either one, really."

"I haven't tried the—what was it called? The chicken one."

"Chicken tikka. Traditional Indian dish turned British pub staple."

"I'll have that one, then. Might as well sample all the local delicacies while I'm here."

Gwen set aside a takeaway container and was peeling the wrapper from a disposable fork when Ianto and John Hart returned from downstairs. Ianto had the shredded remains of a cardboard box in his hand. "It was very angry," Ianto said, waving the cardboard fragments before stuffing them into a bin. "Calmed down when we let it in with the other one, though. They seem to be building a nest in the pet carrier."

"Told you they were social creatures." Hart made a beeline for the food. "Lunch now?"

Gwen held out two boxes. "You want fish or chicken?"

Hart stopped and stared at the bounty. "I get to choose? Usually you feed the prisoner whatever you don't want."

Gwen shrugged. "You've earned it today, catching that spider thing. Call it a reward for showing proper initiative." She pulled the boxes back a bit. "But no more prostitution, all right?"

Ianto's head snapped around at that, but Hart just raised his eyebrows. "Does that mean I'm getting paid now? Because I don't have any local currency. None of your bars take universal credit, and Jack ran off with my Specie unit years ago."

Gwen punted the question to Ianto with a look. He sighed. "I'll agree to a minimal spending allowance, contingent on good behavior."

"Deal." Hart snatched the remaining box of chicken tikka before Gwen could change her mind. "So I guess that means I'm an employee of Torchwood now. Any other benefits I should know about? Corporate discounts?"

"It's a probationary arrangement," Ianto warned. "And completely revocable." He collected his own box of food from Gwen with a word of thanks.

Jamiya chuckled as Hart carried his food over toward one of the unoccupied desks. "It's been a while since you held down a proper job, hasn't it?"

"Hey, I did my time. I worked for the Time Agency for _years_." Hart shoved a bite of chicken in his mouth and continued talking around it. "So what happens if I pass probation? When I'm an official employee, do I get a jacket with 'Team Torchwood' emblazoned across the back? Maybe embroidered with that logo you plaster on everything in sight?" His eyes flicked around the Hub's fixtures, redundantly labeled with Torchwood Ts. "I'll bet to work here, you have to get it tattooed somewhere on your body. Where's yours, Eye Candy? I bet I can guess."

Ianto casually leaned across Jamiya's workstation and pressed a button on Jack's wrist strap, which emitted a high-pitched tone. A strident screech sounded from above, and seconds later Myfanwy swept low over their heads, snapping her beak. Dropping his box of food, Hart threw himself beneath a desk and unleashed a torrent of profanity in at least six different languages.

Ianto tossed a chip from his box high in the air. Myfanwy caught the morsel, made another few circles to see if any more treats were forthcoming, then gave an irritated snap of her wings and climbed back toward her nest.

A full minute after the pteranodon had disappeared into the upper reaches of the Hub, Hart's pale visage appeared again. He slowly crawled out from under the desk, glancing uncertainly from Ianto to the ceiling. "You weren't kidding," he breathed, his voice quavering. "I thought you… Shit. You really do have a pterodactyl."

"Pteranodon," Ianto corrected. He let his eyebrows drift higher. "You thought I was making it up? I'm wounded. When have I ever lied to you?"

Hart stared at Ianto a moment longer, then turned and hastily made his way toward the bathroom. Ianto carefully avoided looking at Gwen and winking until he was long out of sight, knowing that while he might be able to suppress his laughter, Gwen would not.


	16. Chapter 16

The Doctor stumbled off the dance floor and wove erratically through the colorful crowd until he reached the hovering cocktail table behind which Jack had ensconced himself. "That," he panted, seizing the edge of the floating tabletop for balance, "was a bit more than I bargained for."

Jack sipped his Porthandian bubblegin and grinned. "What did you expect when a Velozian asks you to dance?"

"Not being swung around by my ankles in half-gravity, that's for sure," wheezed the Doctor. He punched a beverage order into the pad built into the top of the table, and a moment later a robotic arm deposited a glass of something cold and lavender on the table.

Jack raised an eyebrow at the beverage. "You're drinking a Humburble? Here? That's like going to a speakeasy and ordering a Shirley Temple! C'mon, live a little!"

The Doctor drained half of the beverage in one go. "I think my experience on the dance floor just now was enough living for one night. I'm entitled to one nice, safe, sans-excitement drink after that." He squinted over the rim of his glass at Jack. "But you, Jack… You surprise me."

Jack fiddled with the stir stick in his own drink and tried to look nonchalant. "Oh?"

The Doctor tapped the pad to display the drinks tab. "Unless someone's been buying you drinks at another table, you're still nursing that same glass of bubblegin you were on half an hour ago. No new orders from this table in all that time."

Jack's eyebrow arched again, this time in mock affront. "And it comes as a surprise to you that someone might like to buy a handsome guy like me a drink?"

"Not surprising that they'd _like_ to, no. Somewhat more surprising that you're turning them down."

Jack froze. "What?"

"When I was on the dance floor—the few times I was being swung in this direction—I saw at least four separate parties stop and try to catch your eye. One of them even went so far as to wave an appendage at you. Yet you're still at this table, all by yourself." The Doctor was frowning intently now. "And if there's one thing I don't expect to see in the most fashionable, avant-garde, exclusive nightclub in all of Velshane, it's Captain Jack Harkness drinking _alone_."

Jack scowled and stirred his drink again. "It may come as a surprise to you, Doctor, but even I have my antisocial moments."

"Since when?"

_Since you left me behind. Since becoming immortal. Since fighting all the same wars, again and again. Since watching friends and lovers age and die while I stay the same. Since being buried alive for two thousand years_. _Since Torchwood took my soul_. Jack considered and rejected each possible response to the question.

_Since Ianto Jones became the market standard._

That one was harder to reject.

The Doctor leaned closer, his gaze probing, and when Jack met his eyes he was astonished to see real concern there. "What's wrong, Jack?"

Jack flushed. He wasn't used to the Doctor caring this much—not about _him_, at any rate. "Nothing's wrong. I just… I'm not the same man I was when I met you."

It was too soft a pitch to resist. "For which the universe is very grateful, I'm sure," the Doctor retorted with a grin. He nudged Jack's shoulder. "No, really, you okay? I've never seen you like this, even when the world was ending."

Jack shook his head, unsure how to answer. "I guess I'm just—" He broke off as the realization struck, and it was so absurd that he laughed. "God. I think I'm _homesick_."

The Doctor stared, boggle-eyed. "Homesick? You?" He stared some more. "For where? Boeshane?"

Jack shook his head, the laughter spreading to his shoulders. "For bloody _Cardiff_." He could barely speak now through the convulsions of laughter. "Isn't that the most—" He had to gasp for breath. "—most ridiculous thing you've ever heard? _Nobody_ gets homesick for Cardiff, not even the—the Welsh!" He rested his head in his hands, laughing until tears ran down his cheeks. Patrons at the neighboring tables gave him suspicious looks, but he didn't care. The entire situation was too hilarious.

The Doctor continued staring. After a moment he picked up Jack's drink and tentatively sniffed it, then dipped a finger in and tasted it. He set the drink down and scratched his head. "Not the drink… Decompression sickness? No, wrong atmosphere. Belusian laughing fever?" He placed the back of his hand against Jack's flushed cheek. "Nope." At last he shook his head in frank disbelief. "You're really serious, aren't you?"

Had Jack not been laughing so hard he was in danger of passing out from lack of oxygen, he would have thought that question was perhaps the most absurd thing the Doctor could have asked someone in his condition, and laughed even harder—but as it was, his biological need to breathe won out, and the laughter began to taper off. "Ow," he whimpered when he began to catch his breath, wrapping an arm across his midsection. "I was not prepared for that kind of abdominal workout." He laid his head on the floating table and breathed deeply, waiting for the stitch in his side to release.

The Doctor continued watching him as though he were a specimen, but seemed relieved when Jack did not immediately burst into another gale of laughter. "Right," he said after a while, drawing out the vowel. He fished his sonic screwdriver out of a pocket and aimed it at the order pad.

Jack righted himself and scrubbed drying tears from his cheeks. "What are you doing?"

"Settling our bill." He shot a sheepish glance at Jack. "Unless you're carrying any Velshanian currency?"

Jack wasn't, of course. Normally he would have been flush with credits for all the surrounding systems, thanks to his Specie converter—a universal payment chip that had been illegally modified to siphon accounts, which he'd put to extensive use in his days as a con artist—but he'd left that clever little gadget back on Earth, safely stowed in the housing of his vortex manipulator. Jack rubbed the bare place on his wrist and once again berated himself for leaving the Hub without proper kit.

The Doctor finished with the order pad and tucked his screwdriver back into his breast pocket. "I can't cash out with this, but I think I've suspended the ticket. Come on." He nudged Jack out from behind the floating table.

Jack tossed back the last finger of bubblegin in his glass and followed. "Where are we going?"

"Back to the TARDIS. It's time we were off."

"Off _where?_" Jack jogged to catch up. "I thought you said you wanted to spend a few days here?"

"Eh, I can always come back when there are fewer dancing Velozians to worry about. Besides, I've got to get you back to Cardiff."

"That's not what I—" Jack flushed. "I didn't mean for you to have to cut your holiday short."

"Oh, I'm always on holiday, me," grinned the Doctor. "Besides, I haven't looked in on Cardiff since I dropped you off that last time. Might be nice to see the thrilling sights again."

Jack gave him a look of disbelief. "What sights are those, exactly?"

"Well, you know. The castle, and… the… you know, the big thing I always land the TARDIS next to." He huffed impatiently. "Besides, I've never met your team, not properly, not face to face. Vid screens don't really count. Might be nice to finally meet Gwen and, um…"

"Ianto," Jack supplied when the Doctor couldn't seem to recall his name. "Ianto Jones."

The Doctor's steps slowed, and when Jack looked over, it was to find the Time Lord watching him with a curious expression. "Ohhh," he said, as though he had at last come to understand some great mystery.

Jack returned his stare. "What?"

The Doctor watched him for a few more seconds, then bolted forward at his usual brisk pace. "Right! Ianto, that's the one. I think it's about time we were properly introduced. After all, I feel sort of responsible for you. No, not responsible, no; that could get me in all sorts of trouble. More like I have a kind of… paternal interest in you."

"Paternal—" Jack stumbled to a halt. "Doctor, what are you talking about?"

"Meeting your friends. Don't worry, I'm sure I'll approve." The Doctor flashed a grin over his shoulder. "Come on, Jack, keep up…" His grin faded as his gaze slipped past Jack. "On second thought, do more than keep up. Maybe move a bit faster than before."

Jack turned and saw one of the nightclub's bouncers pelting down the corridor toward them, waving a mobile order pad. The alien began bellowing, and it was not a pleasant sound. "Looks like they discovered your little drink-and-dash, Doctor."

"Certainly looks that way. Which means there's only one thing to do…"

"Somehow, I know exactly what you're going to say," Jack growled.

The Doctor didn't disappoint. "_Run!_"

* * *

Ianto slid a cup of tea carefully into the gap between Jamiya's elbow and a pile of electronic equipment. When she didn't respond with her customary word of thanks, Ianto examined her more closely. Jamiya was hunched slightly forward over the workstation, brow furrowed in concentration. Her eyes moved rapidly over the numbers on the screen in front of her. Occasionally, her lips moved with whatever she was reading.

Ianto cleared his throat softly, and Jamiya blinked. "Sorry to interrupt while you're working, but I'm just going out to pick up lunch, and I wondered if you had any requests."

"Oh, thank you. Anything is fine." She hesitated. "Except for the pie with… kidneys, was it? I'd prefer not to repeat that experience."

"Noted. Is there anything else I can get you while I'm out?"

Jamiya shook her head. "I may go for a little walk myself, once I'm done working out this simulation. It will be good to get away from the screen for a few minutes."

"What simulation?" Ianto skimmed the display, but while he recognized a column of data from the rift manipulator, he couldn't follow exactly what it was doing.

"I went to the site the day before yesterday, to take some readings."

Ianto nodded. "Gwen said. Did you find anything useful?"

"Yes, and no." Jamiya sighed. "I was hoping to find a way to pinpoint exactly where he'd gone. I didn't get that, but I _may_ have an idea how to stabilize the rift openings in that area."

"Stabilize? You mean, fix them open so Jack could get back through?"

"No. Just the opposite." Jamiya leaned back in her chair and rolled her shoulders. "I wondered why all those little portals keep opening and closing right behind that restaurant, and not over a wider area, since the rift isn't that localized. I took some scans, and as near as I can tell, there seems to be some kind of quantum link between the two sides of the portal."

Ianto shook his head. "Quantum physics isn't really my field. What does that mean?"

"It's not my area, either, but fortunately you have a very extensive database, at least insofar as it pertains to the rift. I spent all day yesterday giving myself a crash course in temporal mechanics. My working theory is that the rift is being agitated by something on the other end."

"What could cause that?"

"I'm not sure. A tachyon storm, maybe? Or possibly even some kind of space-time technology malfunction. There are civilizations out there with teleporters and time ships, even in this era."

"I suppose if it's something like a time ship, it wouldn't even have to be from this era. It could have gone back and _then_ malfunctioned." Ianto frowned thoughtfully. "So how would you stabilize the portals?"

"Stabilize might be the wrong word. I think I might be able to stop them from opening. It's a matter of isolating the quantum link and severing it."

Ianto stared at her. "Can you do that?"

"That's what the simulation is trying to determine."

"But if you were to permanently close the portals…"

"Jack would be trapped on the other side, yes." Jamiya sighed. "But these openings are generally unstable and unpredictable. The odds against him coming back through and landing in the _exact_ same place and time are… well, I haven't calculated them, but it wouldn't be a stretch to call them astronomical."

"But as yet, that's the only chance we have." Ianto put his hands on his hips and paced a few steps behind Jamiya's chair. "Even if it's a small one, I don't want to remove _any _chance we have of getting him back."

Jamiya nodded. "I'm just running the simulation so we know, one way or another. It might be useful at some point."

The land line rang, and Ianto reached over automatically to answer it. "Yes?"

"Ianto, is that you?" came an excited voice on the other end. "It's Andy." When Ianto didn't immediately answer, he added, "Andy Davidson?"

Ianto tried to remember if he were still mad at Andy for ruining one of his suits with a chemical fire extinguisher after he'd called them for help with a case the previous week. "Is that the Andy who delivers the pizzas?"

"PC Andy Davidson, Cardiff Police?" Andy wailed plaintively. "You just saw me last week; you can't have forgotten already!"

"Oh, right, PC Fire Extinguisher," Ianto said coolly. "What can I do for you?"

Andy sighed. "Look, I'm sorry about the cock-up at the factory. I really thought you yelled 'put out the fire.'"

"Yes, I can see how 'look out for the wire' could be confusing that way. I assume there's a reason you called?"

"Oh! Right. A call came in this morning. A woman in Llandaff found a body in her garden."

Ianto's stomach moved several centimeters toward the floor. "Let me guess. Face bloated, brain liquefied?"

"Oh. You knew already?" Andy sounded disappointed.

"Not about this body, but it's not the first one that's turned up."

"It seemed like something, well, Torchwood-y. Is it?"

"Definitely."

He took down the address and warned Andy not to let the police touch anything at the scene, then dialed Gwen's number from memory. "Gwen? Head for Llandaff. There's been another victim."


	17. Chapter 17

The address in Llandaff turned out to be just around the corner from Morrie's, its back garden adjacent to the empty lot where they'd found the second victim. Ianto had just finished interviewing the homeowner, an elderly woman who had clearly been shaken by the experience of finding a corpse beneath her best rose bush, when he spotted Gwen and John Hart climbing out of Gwen's car just beyond the police cordon. He met them in the alley between the house and the diner.

"Toxic chemical spill, do you think?" Gwen asked, glancing around at the other homes.

Ianto caught her meaning only because it had so often been necessary to evacuate entire neighborhoods while eliminating an alien threat. "We did that one in Rumney last month. Better make it a natural gas leak, or people might start asking why so many dangerous chemicals are being transported through residential areas."

"You could always set off a few bombs," Hart put in. "That would definitely scare people off, and might even kill whatever is attacking them."

Ianto appealed to Gwen with an eyeroll. "I'm so glad you brought Captain Outrageous along to contribute his useful ideas."

"He was already in the car when you called," Gwen said by way of apology. She nodded toward Morrie's. "I'll go start the evac process. Do you want to look around back again, since we're here anyway?"

"I don't know what more I can find, but I might as well. Hart, you're with me. We don't want any bomb scares."

Hart dutifully followed him to the back of the diner and looked around while Ianto took another series of scans and recorded the data on his PDA. There didn't seem to be any active portals at present, though the area was still saturated with rift energy.

A few minutes later, Gwen stepped through the back door of the diner. "The police are evacuating all residents within a two-block radius," she said. "Anyone for fish and chips?"

Ianto stared at the stack of greasy paper packets in her arms. "Why do you have fish and chips?"

"They'd already put them in the fryer, and all the food was going to be tossed out when they closed to evacuate, so they just gave everything to their customers for takeaway." Gwen unrolled a corner of the top packet and popped a chip in her mouth. "Oh, deese are vewy hot," she said, slurping a quick breath to cool her mouth before swallowing. "John, you hungry?"

For once, John Hart wasn't magnetically attracted to the food. He was crouching on the ground, staring at the debris scattered around the lot. "That's odd," he murmured.

"What's odd?"

"These little bits of metal all over the ground."

"Yeah, I saw those before," Gwen said, sneaking another chip out of the packet. "Looks like some old hardware."

Hart picked up something that looked like a bolt and breathed on it, then rubbed it with his finger. "It's old, all right."

Ianto crossed to where he was kneeling. "You sound as though that's important."

Hart repeated the experiment with his breath on the metal. "See that red glaze that appears on the surface when I warm it up? That's ferrodized xanthum. Hasn't really been used since the development of welding-grade plasteel."

Ianto waited, but no further explanation seemed to be forthcoming. "And that was…?"

"At least a century before this point in history. And nowhere near here. Xanth in its mineral form is highly unstable, and can only be refined in zero gravity, so most of the refineries were based around asteroids in deep space. By the time humans spread that far out, everything had converted to plasteel, which was cheaper and safer to work with." He stood and began shuffling around the lot, kicking up dirt and gravel with his boots. "But there's a lot of xanthum here."

Gwen joined them. "Something must have fallen through the rift, then. Maybe a piece of old space junk or something?"

Hart shook his head. "All these just look like unassembled parts. Look, there's these bolt things, and those square ones are probably some kind of nut to secure them. But no other pieces."

"Is it dangerous?"

Hart held up the small bolt in his hand. Except for its faint red-gold tint, it looked no different than any piece of Earth hardware. "Only if you step on it barefoot. Once it's been ferrodized, xanthum is pretty inert."

Ianto frowned thoughtfully. "Is it used in any sort of time-space technology?"

"What, like a time ship?" Hart shrugged. "It was mostly used in industrial construction. I guess an early time ship might have had some of these holding it together, but there's nothing special about xanthum except that it's stronger than titanium. Why?"

"Jamiya thought there was something activating the rift from the other side. She said it might have been some kind of malfunctioning technology."

"Huh. Interesting theory." Hart shrugged and tossed the bolt back into the gravel. "Well, I've made my future-knowledge contribution for the day. Does that mean I've earned my spending allowance?"

Ianto sighed. "I guess you're behaving well enough."

"Excellent. I'll collect when we get back to the Hub. I could use a drink." Hart beckoned to Gwen with an open hand. "For now, I'll have that fish and chips."

* * *

Jack scarcely waited for the TARDIS to stop its trademark screeching before yanking open the door. He stuck his head outside and breathed deeply. The scent of rain-damp pavement, the fishy breeze off Cardiff Bay, and the odor of frying grease from a half-dozen pubs wrapped around him, welcoming him home. Beside him, water splashed at the base of the tower. Jack's eyes followed the droplets enviously, knowing they would continue flowing down the tower's subterranean structure and reach the Hub before he would.

The Doctor appeared beside him. "Perfect landing, as always. So, where's this secret base of yours?"

"Directly under us. But since you parked on the door, we'll have to go the long way round. Unless you want to move your vehicle to a designated parking zone?"

"But I always park the TARDIS here!" protested the Doctor.

"I know. You did it so often, the perception filter stuck. That's why it's now the door to my secret base." Jack tipped his head to invite the Doctor to follow. "Come on, the other entrance is just at the bottom of the Plass."

Jack strode off down the slope, the Doctor hurrying along behind him. They dodged a loud group of Americans waiting to board the sightseeing ferry and approached the door to the tourist office. Jack tried the door, but it was locked.

"It says it's closed," the Doctor observed. "Doesn't look very inviting, with newspapers over all the windows." He seemed to come to a sudden realization. "But Jack, I've been to Cardiff before, plenty of times. You don't need to pick up a tourist map on my account."

Jack held up a key. "You don't really grasp the concept of _secret base_, do you?" He inserted the key in the lock, but it wouldn't turn. Frowning, he tried it again. "That's weird. It's stuck."

The Doctor waggled his sonic screwdriver. "Here, let me try." The sonic emitted a shrill whirring noise, but nothing happened. "It's deadlock sealed. You sure this is the right door?"

"Of course I'm sure!" Jack snapped. He held the key up to the light. "It _looks_ like the right key…"

They were startled as a mild expletive sounded just behind them, followed by, "_Doctor?_"

Jack spun and stared at the new arrival. The Doctor recovered from his surprise first. "Mickey! Mickey Smith!" He hurried over to clap his former companion on the shoulder, which nearly dislodged the tray of coffees the young man was carrying. "What are you doing here?"

"I was about to ask you the same…" Mickey's eyes traveled past the Doctor and widened. "_Jack?_ Oh my—you—you're back!"

"I… Yeah," Jack faltered. "Yeah, I'm back. What are you doing here?"

"I—oh, man, this is gonna send Gwen right into labor. Here." Mickey shoved the coffee carrier into Jack's hands and fished a key out of his coat pocket. He unlocked the door, gesturing for them to follow him inside, then swung one of the framed tour posters aside and entered an eight-digit code on a keypad recessed into the wall. "We had to upgrade security last year after a group of Polyfronds forced their way into the tunnels," he explained, retrieving the coffees from Jack.

"What do you mean, last year?" Jack glanced around the tourist office, which seemed subtly different than it had been last time he'd seen it.

Mickey didn't seem to understand the question. "Well, I guess it was about eight months ago. So not quite a year."

Jack peered at one of the newspapers pasted over the window. "Doctor," he said in a low voice, "this paper is dated 2010."

"Is it?" The Doctor squinted at the newsprint. "'Wales Wins Double Gold at Commonwealth Games.' Oh, I remember that! They were in Delhi that year. I sat in the first row at the—"

"Doctor," Jack cut him off, "You were supposed to bring me back to the same time I left!"

"Well…" The Doctor scuffed the toe of one trainer on the floor. "The rift sometimes mucks about with the readings. It's really hard to hit an exact date here."

Jack growled low in his throat. "This is exactly what happened last time. You brought me back four months late, and my team had moved on without me. And now it's been over a year!"

"Actually," Mickey put in, "it's been nearly five. It's 2014, mate."

"Five…" Jack's eyes widened. "Five years?"

"Happy new year, I guess?" Mickey shrugged and opened the door to the entrance tunnel. "Come see what we've done with the place."


	18. Chapter 18

Jack caught himself holding his breath as the great cog wheel rolled back with a familiar _whoop_ of alarms. It was absurd to be nervous. This was his home, after all, and it had only been a little over a week since he'd left it. So what if a little time had gone by on the other end? He'd watched the Hub age for well over a century, now. A few years one way or the other couldn't make that much of a difference.

"Jack, you coming?" The Doctor stared back at him expectantly, and Jack realized he was the only one still in the elevator. He hurried after the Doctor and Mickey, who were already stepping through the open cage doors.

"I'm back," Mickey called as he led the way into the Hub. "And I've got a surprise for you!"

"It had better be my latte," came another familiar voice. "I could murder a…" Martha Jones appeared by Toshiko's workstation, and her eyes stretched in pleased surprise. "Doctor! What are you…" Her gaze shifted over. "And Jack! You're back! _Gwen!_" she shouted over her shoulder. "Gwen, come here!" Martha hurried down the steps and embraced both of the new arrivals. "It's so good to see you! Doctor, it's been years!" she chided him.

"Not for me." The Doctor grinned and looked her over. "So you're with Torchwood now? I thought you were working for UNIT?"

"I was, until he went missing—" she jabbed a finger in Jack's direction "—and I had to come help save the world. Again. Stayed on as team medic, since there was a vacancy. Of course, it's turned into team _everything_, since we still don't have enough field operatives to handle the workload."

"Martha's the one who brought me in," Mickey added. "They needed a guy who was good with tech, aliens, and big guns, and, well, that's pretty much my entire CV, so here I am."

"We have a good team. We get by all right." Martha punched Jack lightly in the arm. "Where have you been? Everyone was so worried about you!"

Jack flashed a grin and tried to ignore the uneasiness tightening his gut. "I..."

"_Jack!_" Gwen's screech was one of pure exultation, and she bounded down the steps to throw her arms around him.

Well, _waddled _may have been a more accurate description of her movements. Jack extricated himself from the hug to stare down at her rounded abdomen. "Gwen, you… you're _pregnant?!_"

"Baby number two." She grinned, a bit sheepishly. "We weren't planning for it, but these things have a way of happening."

"Number… two?" Jack felt dazed. How could his world move on so far in such a short time?

"This one's a boy. Rhys agreed to let me name him after you if you didn't come back before he's born. He'll be thrilled you're back; he wanted to name him Dylan." She hugged him again. "I can't believe you're here! Where have you been? What happened?"

"I'll explain everything, but I'd rather only do it once, so let's get everyone together first." Jack was almost afraid to ask, but his thoughts had been fixed on one question ever since the TARDIS had landed. "Where's Ianto?"

"He and the others went out to investigate some religious nutter down Swansea way. Started what amounts to a cult a few months ago, and we think there's probably something alien to it. Cults around here always seem to be." Gwen shrugged, then spotted the drinks in Mickey's hands. "Which one's my decaf, love?"

Mickey indicated one of the cups by pointing with his nose, and Gwen took it and slurped eagerly. "I can't wait until I can have caffeine again," she moaned. "That's the worst thing about pregnancy. No booze, no sushi, no caffeine."

"You all drink too much coffee, anyway," Martha chided. She collected her latte. "Thanks for making the run, Mickey."

Jack's relief at hearing that Ianto was all right—and still with Torchwood—soon morphed into curiosity. Gwen had said Ianto had gone with the _others_. "How many new employees have you recruited while I was gone?"

Gwen sipped thoughtfully at her decaf. "It's just Martha and Mickey, isn't it? Everyone else was here before you left."

Jack ran through a quick head count, but the numbers didn't add up. "You, Ianto, Martha, Mickey, and… who else?"

Gwen's answer was interrupted by the cog door alarms. "That'll be them now," she said with a grin. She leaned around Jack to call through the opening door. "Hey! Guess who just dropped in?"

Jack turned, eager to catch a glimpse of Ianto, but found himself face-to-face with John Hart instead. Hart stared for a second before his face lit up with a grin. "Jack! What do you know. And here I'd put my money on you having been fatally decompressed in vacuum." He gave Jack a quick kiss on the side of his mouth before moving out of the way. "For what it's worth, It's one wager I'm glad I lost. But we can catch up later. Don't want to hold up your more adoring fans. Ooh, is one of those mine?" Hart snagged a coffee cup without waiting for Mickey's reply and continued into the Hub.

Immediately behind Hart, much to Jack's astonishment, was his mother. Jamiya's eyes were brimming, and she hugged him tightly. "You're back," she breathed. "I was so afraid something had happened to you!"

"I'm fine, _matkal_," Jack assured her. He kissed her cheek. "I just got a little delayed. I didn't know you'd still be here."

"I couldn't leave, not until I knew what had happened to you." She held his face between her hands. "Welcome home, Javic."

The Doctor's head was swiveling back and forth between Jack and his mother, and he took advantage of the pause in conversation to interject, "Sorry, but… are you two related?"

Jamiya gave the Doctor a curious once-over. "He's my son. Why?"

The Doctor's round eyes grew a size larger, and he extended a hand to pump Jamiya's arm in greeting. "I'm so very pleased to meet you, Jack's mother! Jack, you never told me you had a mother!"

Jack rolled his eyes. "What, did you think I spontaneously sprang into existence? Of course I have a mother."

The Doctor ignored him. "I'm the Doctor, by the way. Jack and I go way back. All the way to 1941, in fact." He grinned as though he'd cracked a brilliant joke.

"Jamiya Thane. Are you the one who brought him back home?"

"That's me. My TARDIS is parked just outside." The Doctor pointed upward.

"That's his time ship," Jack explained. "He picked me up on—wait, I said I was only going to explain this once. Where's Ianto?"

"He was parking the car," Jamiya said. "He'll be here soon."

"He's here now."

Jack spun toward the new voice and locked eyes with Ianto, who was standing just inside the door that led to the garage and smiling politely. "Welcome back, Jack." His gaze shifted over to the exuberant pinstriped figure hovering beside Jamiya, and he nodded in greeting. "Doctor. Nice to finally meet you in person."

Jack stared. Ianto was dressed in an exceptionally well-tailored suit, and—Jack blinked to be sure his eyes weren't playing tricks on him—he wore a short, neat beard along the line of his jaw. He looked _amazing_.

And he hadn't moved a single step since seeing Jack.

The Doctor bolted forward and seized Ianto's hand, shaking it vigorously. "Nice to meet you, Mr. Jones," he grinned. "Our little vidscreen introduction was sadly inadequate. Jack's told me about you."

Ianto's smile turned a little brittle. "Oh?"

"Don't worry, all good things." The Doctor pumped his hand a few more times, then gazed around the assembled group. "Is this everyone? I think that means we can finally let Jack explain what's happened."

Jack tore his eyes away from Ianto and flashed a smile around the room. "Sure. Where do I begin?"

"How about what happened when you fell through the rift five years ago?" Gwen prompted.

Jack flinched at the reminder of just how long he'd been gone. "Not much to tell. I woke up in a desert on another planet…"

It didn't take long for Jack to tell his story, even with periodic interruptions by the Doctor. He'd only been gone about a week, in his own timeline, and there wasn't much about his travel through the rift or subsequent rescue that he could explain. He'd been very, very lucky that the TARDIS had sensed his danger and veered off course to save him.

"And then she dropped me off five years late," he added. "I wanted to come back right away, but…" he glanced at the Doctor.

"Proximity to the rift can make time travel a bit… messy," the Doctor explained. "This was the closest the TARDIS would bring us."

Jack sighed. It was as close to an apology as he was likely to get. He knew it wasn't exactly the Doctor's fault, but it was difficult not to be frustrated when he'd clearly missed so much.

"We've managed all right," Ianto said. "It's not the first time Jack's suddenly gone missing, after all. No real harm done."

Jack flinched. Gwen noticed. "Jack, are you all right?"

Jack rubbed the side of his head, which had twinged with a lingering pain on and off since his injury. It wasn't the cause of his discomfort just now, though Gwen didn't need to know that. "I fractured my skull a few days ago. Still healing."

Jamiya lurched toward him, looking as though her child had just skinned his knee. "You fractured your _skull_?" She hesitated. "Did it… did it kill you?"

Jack's eyes widened. "You know?" he asked quietly.

Jamiya nodded. "I was bound to to find out sooner or later. You should have just told me yourself."

Jack looked away. "I didn't want you to worry."

"So instead, you lead with 'I fractured my skull'?" Jamiya frowned. "You're right, that's much less concerning."

"It was just a concussion," Jack assured her. "And not even that, any more. I heal quickly. I'll just have a headache for a couple of weeks as it sorts itself out."

Jamiya didn't look convinced, but Martha patted her arm. "I'll check him out and make sure he's okay," she promised. "All right, Jack?" Jack rolled his eyes, but nodded.

"Well, if that's sorted," Ianto said, "I'd like to have a briefing about the cult we investigated today—which _definitely_ involves something alien, and bears further action on our part. Shall we relocate to the board room in, say, five minutes?"

The rest of the group glanced between Ianto and Jack in some surprise, but dutifully dispersed. Jack received a few more hugs and shoulder-pats as the rest of the team filed toward the briefing room, but he soon caught up to Ianto, who was collecting some files from the printer. "Ianto…"

"You're welcome to join, of course," Ianto said, with all apparent sincerity. "You needn't feel obligated to participate in the operation, especially if you're feeling poorly. But I'm sure you're curious to see how we've fared in your absence."

Before Jack could reply, the Doctor strolled up beside him. "Do you mind if I sit in? I'm a bit curious about this alien cult."

"Of course." Ianto smiled politely. "You may have valuable insights to share. I'm sure we'd all welcome your experience."

Ianto led the Doctor toward the board room, and Jack followed a short distance behind, unsettled.


	19. Chapter 19

"So this 'holy relic' that the cult worships… it's what, exactly?"

Ianto tapped his PDA, and a grainy, crooked image of a humanoid figure appeared on the screen mounted above the briefing room's table. "Our button cameras recorded the body from a distance, but we couldn't get close enough to examine the object embedded within it. The body looks like some kind of early human, the sort of man they're occasionally pulling out of peat bogs. Except it's alive. There's some kind of glowing object inside its chest, which is the actual artifact, or relic, or whatever you want to call it. It's meant to grant its worshipers extended life. Eternal, if you believe the brochure."

"I think we can dismiss that claim outright," Jamiya put in. "I was able to chat with a group of the older women during the social meeting after the ritual, and one of their number recently succumbed to heart failure. Her friends were lamenting that she must not have performed her rituals properly."

"What do these rituals entail?" asked Gwen.

"Mostly, giving money to the High Intercessor," Hart drawled, "he being the lucky bastard who owns said artifact and the body it's apparently sustaining. Claims to be some kind of archaeologist, though I got the impression he's more of a collector than a finder. There's also some chanting and marching in circles with candles and shit, but it's clearly the money he's after." His eyebrows did a little dance. "Man after my own heart."

"How do you know this holy relic thing is alien?" asked Martha. "Could something else be keeping the body alive?"

"For that matter, how do you know the body is alive at all?" Jack squinted at the indistinct form on the monitor, but it was difficult to see any detail. "Even if it moves, it could be animatronic, or something."

The Doctor nodded. "There are some very realistic synthetic life replicas out there. Even some non-alien ones, developed right here on Earth."

Ianto acknowledged the questions with a nod. "The long-range scan did register the body itself as a life form. So if it's a fake, it's a very, very good one."

"According to the High Intercessor," Hart continued in a bored tone, "this relic thing, whatever it is, was given to mankind by the gods tens of thousands of years ago, and has kept this prehistoric man alive all this time. This Chosen One has been guarded throughout history by a secret sect of monks, but now the time has come for the great truth to be revealed, blah, blah, blah." He scribed a repeating circle in the air with his fingertips. "The usual."

Gwen's eyebrows were high. "I think I've seen this movie. Was there a tomb full of booby traps, too?"

Ianto chuckled. "I don't know about the secret order of monks, but the rest isn't as far-fetched as you might think. There are trace amounts of rift radiation, and the readings are consistent with the rate of radioactive decay that would occur over thousands of years. I certainly don't believe it's a gift from the gods, or anything, but it's quite possible that an alien object fell through the rift a long time ago, and a kind of folklore sprang up around it. We've seen that happen before."

"Fair enough," said Gwen. "So what are we going to do about it?"

Ianto shot her a look. "_We_ are not doing anything. You, Gwen, are on maternity lockdown."

Gwen groaned. "But I'm tired of just coordinating from the Hub! And I'd be perfect to infiltrate a cult! Who would suspect a pregnant woman?"

"Absolutely not. I'm not putting you in the field pregnant, not after what happened last time."

"But—"

"That's an order," Ianto said firmly. Gwen sulked, but stopped arguing.

Jack stared. Since when was Ianto in charge? Last time he'd left, he had come back to find Gwen giving orders, with Owen tussling with her for command. Ianto had clearly been the _last_ in the chain of authority then.

"The final ritual is scheduled for tomorrow evening," Ianto continued. "That's when the High Intercessor—whose real name is Grigory Rasdall—will remove the holy relic from its current host and take it into his own body, thereby ascending to the status of Eternal Sage. His titles, not mine."

Mickey whistled. "This bloke hasn't half got an ego."

"Hart and I did some reconnaissance of the facility before we left," Ianto continued. "There's a fair amount of security on the perimeter, but it's mostly an automated system, so we should be able to bypass it pretty easily. There are armed guards inside the building that we'll have to avoid or neutralize. We're going to crash the ritual and retrieve the alien object once it's out of the host. Hart and I will go in. Mickey, I'll need you on site to take out the security systems. Martha, I want you nearby, as backup in case we need help with the extraction. Hopefully we won't need your medical skills, but the guards are armed, so be prepared for anything."

"What about the current host?" Martha asked. "He may be a victim of this Rasdall, too."

"He—it—whatever it is didn't appear to be conscious when we saw him. It's possible he's been drugged, in which case he's likely being held against his will, but I'll make that call based on the situation we find tomorrow." Ianto glanced at his watch. "Given the time it takes to drive to Swansea and set up for the operation, we'll leave here at noon. You all know what equipment you'll need. Any other questions before we adjourn?"

Jack had a thousand questions, but he wanted to be alone with Ianto to ask them.

"All right," Ianto said when no one else spoke. "We're finished for the night. I know some of you have plans, but do try to get some rest; we have a big day tomorrow."

The team filed out of the room, but Martha caught Jack's arm before they returned to the main area. "I want to see you in the medical bay."

Jack followed her obediently down the stairs and seated himself on the autopsy table. "Martha, I'm fine."

"I know you are, but your mother is worried, and I promised I'd check you out. Where did you hit your head?" She palpated his skull where he indicated. The pain was moderate, but Jack tried not to flinch, lest she report that he was still injured.

"Martha, you coming?" Mickey called down over the railing. "The show starts at eight, and the Doctor wants to come along, so we'll need to get an extra ticket."

"Be right up," Martha called back. Above, Mickey vanished into the Hub.

"Where are you going?" Jack asked.

"The Cardiff Sci-Fright Festival. A local theatre is running a bunch of awful old monster movies. Mickey wants to laugh at the bad rubber masks." Martha shrugged and flashed a light over one of Jack's eyes to check his pupil dilation. "I can take it or leave it, but it makes him happy if I go."

Jack frowned. "But aren't you…" He hesitated, unsure how to ask.

Her hands stilled. "Oh. Right, you were gone already." She sighed. "Tom and I… it didn't work out. He stayed in London, and I moved to Cardiff."

Jack didn't know what to say to that. He'd never met Martha's fiance. "I'm sorry."

She smiled tightly. "It's all right. It's probably for the best. The world I met him in… well, it never really existed, so he was never quite the same man I wanted him to be."

"It did exist," Jack said gently. "It's just that everyone forgot about it except us." He squeezed Martha's hand. "So, you and Mickey…?"

She laughed. "It's a bit daft, isn't it? We're totally different types. But we get on well, so I guess we'll see where it leads. We're taking things slow."

"Martha!" Mickey's voice floated down to them. "We're gonna be late!"

"Except for right now, which is the opposite of slow." Martha shook her head and grabbed her jacket. "Your head seems fine. I'll tell your mother not to worry. And Jack…" She smiled. "I'm glad you're back. For your sake, and everyone else's. They've all really missed you." She turned and hurried up the stairs.

Jack followed at a slower pace, reaching the main level just in time to help Gwen into her coat. "Thanks," she panted. "I am _so_ ready to be done with this pregnancy. It makes every little thing exhausting."

"Looks like you don't have long to go."

"Just five more weeks." She turned to give him a cheerful grin. "I'm off home. It's too late tonight, because she'll be asleep, but maybe on Saturday, you can come come by and meet my little girl."

Jack envisioned a plump toddler with Gwen's gap-toothed smile. "I'd like that. I'll see you tomorrow. Give my love to Rhys."

"He'll be so pleased to learn he can name the baby Dylan. Ah, well, it's worth it to have you back again." She hugged him again. "Good night, Jack."

Gwen hadn't even reached the door when John Hart breezed by Jack's arm. "Later."

"What happened to catching up?" Jack called after him, albeit halfheartedly. He was really more anxious to find Ianto than to spend any time with his psychotic ex-partner—though he was _very_ curious to hear why Hart had ended up working for Torchwood, and how it was possible that neither Gwen nor Ianto had yet been driven to homicide working with him.

"Can't," Hart returned over his shoulder. "Sabine is waiting for me at home, and she gets anxious if I stay out too late."

Jack blinked. "Who is Sabine?"

"You mean _what _is Sabine," Gwen called back from the door, "and the answer is an enormous alien ferret."

"She's a Mustelan," Hart corrected. "She came to Earth for political asylum. She's very sweet. And very amorous."

"He's shagging a giant ferret," Gwen added in a sing-song voice before exiting.

"Well, that's true enough," Hart admitted without a trace of shame. "She can't get enough of me. And this is Mustelan breeding season." He winked. "Gotta run."

Jack watched the cog door close behind them and exhaled. The five years he'd been gone had generated a tremendous amount of change, but it wasn't quite different _enough_ for him to find a secure footing. The Hub looked more or less the same, if a bit more cluttered. His desk and chair and coat rack were still where he'd left them, though Ianto seemed to have moved in and claimed Jack's office as his own. His friends were a little older, but didn't look dramatically different. It was the same environment, the same world, and yet the differences—subtle though they were—were uncanny.

But one change bothered him more than all the rest combined. When Jack spotted Ianto exiting his office a short time later, he decided that now was as good a time as any to tackle the most important difference of all.


	20. Chapter 20

Ianto saw Jack coming from across the Hub. He paused and draped his coat over a chair at what was now Mickey's workstation. "You're welcome to stay here, if you need a place to sleep," he said as Jack approached. "I haven't changed your quarters at all. Your clothes and belongings are just as they were."

"Not my office, though." Jack softened the remark with a smile, lest he sound bitter. He wasn't, really—just a bit disoriented.

"That was a matter of necessity. We ran out of stations, with the number of people we had, and it made the most sense for me to use yours. Though if you want it back, I can kick Hart out of his desk. He never does any paperwork, anyway."

Jack decided the matter of his office could be settled later. "I was surprised to see him here. Working here, anyway."

"He can be quite useful, when there's something to motivate him. He can also be a bit wild, but Jamiya usually keeps him in line."

"I can imagine." Jack shook his head. "That… also surprised me."

"What, your mother working for Torchwood?" Ianto shrugged. "She's a very good operative. Originally she stayed to help us look for you, but she stepped up when we needed a hand, and never left. She's invaluable when we need to infiltrate an organization, like that cult today. Nobody suspects someone of her age."

Jack wasn't sure how he felt about his mother being used as a spy, but he mentally tabled that discussion for another time, as well. "And you're running things now?"

"I had seniority. I came here months before Gwen, and I was at Torchwood One for more than a year before that."

"I know. It just surprised me, since last time I was gone, Gwen seemed to take over."

"Last time was different," Ianto said crisply. "Last time Gwen and Owen were scrapping for position, and I stayed out of it. This time…" His eyes flicked to Jack. "It was a different situation entirely." Almost as an afterthought, he added. "And when Gwen turned up pregnant, it only made sense. This job tends to be very physically demanding, and at some point she had to stop tackling Weevils."

"Yeah. I still can't wrap my head around the thought of her as a mother."

"Disappointed?"

Jack blinked. "No. She seems happy, so I'm happy for her. Why would I be disappointed?"

Ianto's expression remained perfectly neutral. "She was one of your hand-picked operatives. It's harder to send someone into danger, knowing there are children depending on them."

"It was always hard to send her into danger," Jack countered. "The same goes for you. I never liked putting either one of you at risk." He had been hoping to move the conversation to more personal topics, and this was the closest it had come naturally, so he took a breath and dove off the edge. "So what prompted this?" Stepping closer, Jack ran a thumb across the narrow line of beard along Ianto's jaw. The hair was more supple than he'd expected, and he anticipated how it would feel against his own face.

Ianto tolerated the touch with a good-natured eyeroll. "Too many hectic overnights on Torchwood business. After the third day in a row where I didn't have time to shave, I decided it might be more efficient to only bother shaving on days when I actually had free time. That was two years ago."

"It looks good. _You_ look good." And it was true: Five years had put a few new lines on his face, but this Ianto was leaner and more muscular than the one Jack had left, and the beard accentuated his fine bone structure. Jack had always found Ianto attractive, but now he was approaching _stunning_.

"I wear sleep deprivation well," Ianto rejoined in his customary dry tone. "Maybe now that you're back, I can average more than one full night's sleep per week." He arched an eyebrow at Jack. "That is, assuming you're staying."

"Of course I'm staying! I never wanted to leave in the first place. Believe me, falling through a portal and displacing myself by a couple of centuries was not Plan A." He shot a glance toward the invisible lift, over which the TARDIS sat. "Nor was coming back five years later than I left. The rift complicates time travel."

"The rift complicates a lot of things."

Jack searched his face, but either he'd lost the ability to interpret Ianto's subtle expressions in the week he'd been away, or Ianto had perfected his poker face in the intervening years, because Jack couldn't get a read on him. "Is that supposed to mean something more than the obvious?"

Ianto gave a cool shrug. "You tell me. It's been five years. A lot can become complicated in that time."

Jack didn't like where this was going. "It's only been a week for me."

"And yet you still managed to end up on holiday with the Doctor." Ianto smiled wryly and looked away. "Some things remain constant."

Jack gaped at him. "Are you—are you _jealous_?"

"How could I be?" Ianto's eyes swung back to Jack. "I don't even know if I have the right."

Jack didn't know what that was supposed to mean, either, and it fanned his frustration. "Ianto, I didn't ask to fall through a hole in space and land halfway across the galaxy."

"And I didn't push you. Yet here we are."

Jack scowled. "Is that your version of 'thanks for the memories, but while you were lost in space, I moved on'?"

"I wish I had." Ianto's eyes narrowed. "I wanted to. God, how I wanted to."

"Then why didn't you?" Jack crossed his arms. "Why aren't you heading home to someone right now?"

"I don't know if you've noticed, but the schedule Torchwood keeps is hell on one's social life," Ianto said wryly. "Even if I'd had the option, I wouldn't have had the time."

"Your coworkers all seem to have lives, judging by the way they lit out of here this evening."

"Yes. Well. They haven't been trapped in some kind of… emotional limbo."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

Ianto turned and strode slowly toward the sofa before answering. "You know, with Lisa, even with Rachel, there was a definite end to the relationship. I knew when it was over, when it was all right to move on. But after you disappeared, I didn't know where I stood. I didn't know if you'd come back in a day, or a year, or ever, or what you expected of me if you did." He paused in his pacing and frowned. "I _never_ knew where I stood with you. But as long as you were missing, there wasn't even the possibility of getting on with my life. Whatever you may be, I'm not the sort of man who can be involved with more than one person at a time."

Jack bristled. "What do you mean, whatever I may be?"

"Don't play ignorant, Jack. It doesn't suit you."

The thin layer of disgust in Ianto's tone was infuriating. "I still don't see how your lack of social life has anything to do with me."

"You really don't, do you?" Ianto shook his head slowly. "Five years, with no hint of your return, with no closure. And every time I convinced myself I could have a life of my own, do something _normal _like go out and meet new people, I'd wind up feeling guilty—just because I'd had a drink with someone while you were still missing, and I knew I wouldn't have done if you'd been here. It was like your shadow was hanging over me, taunting me with what I would be giving up if I truly accepted you'd gone." He looked away. "I tried, but I couldn't do it. No matter how miserable or lonely I was, I couldn't give up hope that you'd return." The wryness returned to his voice. "So instead, I gave up everything else."

"So somehow it's _my_ fault that you couldn't cope with being alone?"

"That's not it at all." Ianto raked a hand through his hair. "It's not just that you weren't here; I could have handled that. It's the _uncertainty_. Not knowing whether I was meant to wait for you. Whether you'd even want me to, if you ever came back, or if you would have considered yourself released from all attachments once you were in a different place and time." He shoved his hands in his pockets. "And now you stroll back in here with the Doctor, and I still don't know."

Ianto's blatant lack of trust in him stung more bitterly than Jack could have imagined. "Well, if you're looking for a sure thing, I'm probably going to disappoint you sooner or later," Jack snapped. "For that matter, if you can't handle a reality where things are in a constant state of flux, I'm not sure why you're still with Torchwood."

Ianto sighed. "If you haven't figured it out by now, I can't explain it to you." He crossed to the desk and collected his coat. "I'm going home, because tonight I actually have the chance to get eight consecutive hours of sleep, and I'm not going to sacrifice that to argue with you. We can continue this tomorrow, if you've calmed down by then."

"_Calmed down?_" Jack hissed.

Ianto just sounded weary as he said, "Good night, Jack."

Jack watched him go, pulse pounding, knowing he needed to say something but too angry to think what. He was still fuming as the cog door rolled shut behind Ianto.

"You," a voice from above declared suddenly, "are an unqualified _idiot_."

Jack whirled to see his mother leaning over the railing of the upper walkway. "What?"

"A sweet boy like that tells you he hasn't been able to think of anyone but you in five years, and instead of being glad that he still cares for you, that he _waited_ for you all this time, you throw a tantrum." Jamiya began to make her way down the spiral staircase. "I was checking the seedlings in the hothouse. I wasn't trying to eavesdrop, but you weren't exactly being quiet."

Jack couldn't believe his mother was siding with Ianto. "He practically accused me of cheating on him!"

"He did not. He said the parameters of your relationship were unclear. That's not the same thing."

Jack scowled. "You sound like an engineer."

"Well, I am one," Jamiya snapped. "And you're being deliberately obtuse. It's not Ianto's fault if you were vague about your expectations. Did you ever define your relationship? Establish boundaries? Did you agree not to see other people?"

"It wasn't anything that structured. We were just…" Jack gestured helplessly. "You know?"

"You can't even describe what you were to each other, and you're angry at Ianto for being confused?"

"I'm not angry about that. It's that he doesn't trust me!"

"Javic Piotr Thane." Jamiya glared at him with a mother's righteous anger. "I have seen you flirt. I have heard your friends talk about you, and repeat the anecdotes you've told them. Don't you dare pretend that you have never given Ianto cause to doubt your faithfulness."

"But I—"

"If he vanished for five years, with no word, can you honestly tell me that you wouldn't consider being with anyone else? That you would stay faithful to his memory _indefinitely_?"

"I…" Jack hesitated. Would he? It was easy to say so now, in his own defense, but would have have felt that way before this conversation? He and Ianto had never even talked about exclusivity…

"That's what I thought." Jamiya shook her head. "You should apologize, first thing tomorrow. Ianto deserves to be treated better than that."

Jack deflated a little. "I know he does."

"And if you grovel very deeply and are very, very lucky, he may even give you a second chance. Put things right before you ruin your chance to be with someone who cares for you like he does."

Jack looked away. "I don't know. Maybe it's better if we just end it now."

"Better—" Jamiya gaped at him. "Do you have any idea how much you mean to him? You didn't see him in those first months after you vanished, but I did. He was heartbroken. He's been waiting for you for _years_."

Jack tried not to calculate what percentage of Ianto's total life expectancy five years equaled. "And if I let him go now, he still has time to find someone else. He won't waste his whole life on me."

Jamiya frowned. "What's changed in the past week? That's how long you said you've been away, isn't it?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean when I first came here, that first day I saw you together, I got the impression that Ianto was someone very important to you."

"He is!"

"But now you don't want to be with him."

Jack sighed. "It's not that I don't want to."

"So why not just tell him that you still love him and want to be with him? Problem solved; confusion eliminated. Happy ending."

Jack tensed. "There's no such thing as a happy ending. Not where I'm involved."

"Why not?"

"Because I'll live forever!" Jack burst. "Because there are only two endings when I care about someone: Either they leave me, or I have to watch them die. Because it doesn't matter what I do, or how much I want to be with them, or if I say I love them. It's _always_ going to end the same way!"

Jamiya regarded him thoughtfully. "I think it matters to Ianto."

Her quiet words derailed Jack's tirade. "What?" he sputtered.

"You may not see the point in telling him you love him, when you just see it as doomed from the start. But I think it would mean the world to him to know how you feel."

"I can't just…" Jack shook his head. "It's complicated," he finished lamely.

"It can't be that complicated. Either you love him or you don't."

Jack appealed to the ceiling with his eyes. "I'm his boss. And we have a… a history. Trust issues." He glanced over to where Ianto had been pacing a few minutes before. "I think we've just demonstrated _that_ clearly enough."

"That man _loves you_. It's written in every line of him. I don't know what kind of history you mean, but it clearly isn't an impediment to his feelings." She folded her arms sternly over her chest. "And quite frankly, if any man looked at _me_ the way he looks at you, I wouldn't waste time making excuses or worrying about the future." She frowned as Jack slumped into a chair. "What's holding you back? You do love him, don't you?"

"Of course I do!" Jack snapped, then sighed and scrubbed a hand across his face. "And that's the reason," he muttered.

"You won't tell him you love him because… you love him? I don't understand."

"It's like you said—he deserves better."

Jamiya's frown deepened. "Don't you sell yourself short—"

"You don't understand," Jack cut her off. "Ianto… Ianto is brilliant. He's smart, and funny, and gorgeous, and thoughtful, and…" Jack sighed again. "He had this girlfriend, before I met him. He loved her so much, he would have done anything—and did. He sacrificed _everything_ for her. When she died, it nearly killed him." Jack stared down at the desk, idly rolling a pen back and forth between his fingers. "If she'd lived, he'd probably be married, maybe even have a kid by now. And he would be deliriously happy, because she was his whole life. Everything he ever wanted."

"That's a tragedy, but you can't punish yourself because Ianto's girlfriend died."

Jack smiled wryly. "Actually I can, because I'm the one who killed her."

Jamiya's eyes widened. "What?"

"Like I said, history." Jack waved that aside. "But it was necessary, and he understands. We've worked through all that."

She absorbed this. "Then what's the problem?"

"The problem is, he _deserves_ that happiness. He's been through so much. He ought to have a home, and a family, and someone who loves him every bit as much as he loved her. Someone who will always put him first. Someone he can grow old with." Jack flicked the pen away. "None of which is me."

"But you do love him," Jamiya pointed out.

"Not the way he loved her. Not the way he loves _anyone_." Jack shook his head. "Ianto's love is like a force of nature. I don't think I'm even capable of that kind of selfless devotion."

Jamiya was silent for a moment before asking, "Was she?" Jack looked up in confusion, and she added, "His girlfriend?"

"I… don't know," Jack murmured. "I mean, I didn't know her. I guess… He loved her, so I thought…"

"So maybe you're still selling yourself short." She hitched a hip onto the edge of the desk. "Maybe Ianto is the most loving, caring person in the known universe, and there's no one _anywhere_ who is worthy of him. But whether or not you think it's right, he's chosen you. So perhaps instead of judging yourself unworthy, you should respect _his_ judgment, and accept that selfless, devoted, force-of-nature love he's offering you."

Jack stared up at her. "And what happens in ten years? Or twenty? What about when he's in his eighties, and I look the same?"

"Ianto is an intelligent man. He's a rare, brilliant blend of the analytical and the sentimental. And if you're sitting here fretting about what your immortality means for your relationship, I guarantee that Ianto has already considered every possible outcome, every emotional or social ramification, and come to terms with it. And he did all that _years_ ago. He wouldn't have stuck with you this long if he didn't think it was worth it. He's too smart to set himself up for disappointment." She nudged Jack's shoulder. "Smarter than you, in that regard."

Jack sighed deeply, turning her words over in his mind. "I don't really want to give him up," he confessed after a while.

"Make sure he knows that." She put an arm around his shoulder and hugged him. "You make sure he never doubts it again."


	21. Chapter 21

Jack was up early the next morning, hoping that Ianto was the first into the Hub so he could resolve their argument from the previous night, but to his dismay Martha and Mickey were the first through the door. They greeted him cheerfully, and Jack did his best to conceal his irritation. "How was the movie?" he asked.

"Bonkers," Mickey laughed. "I wish we could have stayed for the whole festival."

Martha flashed a tight-lipped smile that expressed her opinion of the film more eloquently than words, and quickly detoured to the medical bay where she wouldn't be drawn into a discussion of the finer points of B-grade horror.

The clock ticked on, and Gwen arrived next. She immediately ran over to Jack with a photo wallet. "Here, you missed the baby pictures." She seized his arm and dragged him over to the sofa, where she plopped onto a cushion beside him. "Everyone else had to look at them when she was born, so now you do, too."

Jack glanced over at her workstation. "What, you mean you don't have a whole framed collection on your desk? What kind of a mother are you?"

Gwen shook her head. "After the Hub was breached last year, we thought it might be a security risk to have family photos on display, so we took everything personal out. Here, this is when she was first born…"

Jack complimented the photos and half-listened to Gwen's humorous anecdotes about what her daughter had done that morning, smiling at all the appropriate moments. All the while, he kept one eye fixed on the cog door. Where was Ianto?

Jamiya came in at half past eight. She greeted her son with a kiss on the cheek, checked to make sure the others were out of earshot, and fixed him with a serious look. "Are you going to talk to Ianto today?"

"Just as soon as he gets here," Jack assured her. "Where is he?"

Jamiya shrugged. "I'm not sure. He's usually here by now."

At a quarter to nine, which was well past the hour Jack was accustomed to seeing him in the mornings, Ianto finally arrived. His lean face was full of shadows, and the blurred edges of his beard indicated he hadn't bothered to shave. He glanced around to check that the others were all in attendance before advancing far into the Hub, and Jack was struck with the unhappy suspicion that Ianto's extra-late arrival might have been deliberate, to avoid being caught alone with Jack. If so, that didn't bode well for their reconciliation.

"Ianto, love, are you feeling all right?" Gwen asked when she spotted him. "You look as though you didn't sleep at all."

Ianto expertly avoided eye contact. "Stayed up late working out our plan of entry," he said. He must have been tired, because he forgot to suppress the little fidget in his fingers that told Jack he wasn't being entirely truthful. Jack wondered if Ianto had stayed up all night fretting over their argument, as he had, or if he had actually been working for part of the night. "Hart, Mickey, Martha, I want to see you all in my office. We should go over this floor plan before we leave."

Jack had no desire to broach the topic of their relationship's future in front of the others, but he was afraid that if he didn't wedge the gate of communication open right away, he wouldn't be able to apologize later. For the next twenty minutes he loitered in the main area of the Hub, finding excuses to move from desk to desk, waiting for the briefing to finish.

At last the others emerged from the office and returned to their own workstations, and Jack bolted upstairs and maneuvered into position at the top of the spiral staircase. He couldn't conceive of a world in which Ianto did not make coffee, so he knew it was only a matter of time until Ianto went to that corner of the Hub. In an attempt to be helpful and ingratiate himself further, Jack had washed the mugs and a plate he'd found in the sink earlier that morning. Sure enough, when Ianto emerged from his office, he headed directly for the coffee machine. Jack timed his descent to arrive at the base of the stairs at the same moment Ianto reached the kitchenette. He hovered at Ianto's elbow, trying to look casual.

Ianto eyed the clean dishes and shot Jack a knowing look before rearranging the order of the mugs beside the sink.

"Sorry. I wasn't sure what went where," Jack said. "New dishes."

Ianto gave a noncommittal grunt and retrieved Jack's striped mug from a cluttered shelf behind the coffee machine. He rinsed it under the tap to remove the light film of dust, then placed it in the row with the others.

Jack took this as a hopeful sign—if not of their relationship status, then at least of impending coffee distribution. "Ianto, about last night…"

"Not now, Jack."

"I just wanted to say…"

"Jack." Ianto set a mug down with unnecessary force. "Not only do I not have the energy to spare right now, I am about to go break into a secured cult headquarters to steal an alien device that's planted inside a cross between a Neanderthal and a zombie, and if I'm caught, I will likely be shot by the extortionist who runs the place. What I _don__'t_ need is any additional distractions, including, but not limited to, stress or emotional trauma stemming from a continuation of our discussion from last night."

"All right," Jack agreed hastily. "But we'll talk later, okay? When you're ready."

Ianto pressed his eyes shut in a way that conveyed he didn't think he'd ever be ready, but nodded silently.

Jack took in the dark circles beneath his eyes and his pale, drawn lips. "Ianto, do you want me to go do this cult job instead? Being shot is less of a risk for me."

"You haven't been to the facility, so you don't know the layout. The ritual is in a few hours; we haven't time to brief you. Also, don't you have a concussion?"

"John Hart can talk me through it. And Martha looked me over and said I was fine."

"I'm not sure I trust Hart to direct a field operation on his own."

"We used to work together," Jack reminded him. "We've done plenty of blind jobs before. And I think he'd probably be more reliable with me as his partner than with you. I know how to keep him under control…"

Ianto's lips compressed into a thin, pale line. "Jack, please don't subvert the order of my world any more than you already have."

Jack showed his palms in surrender. "Fine. It's your call. But I'm here if you need me for anything."

"Right." Ianto focused on the coffee machine for a minute. "You know, there is something you can do for me."

Jack brightened. "Name it."

"Mickey and Martha are going to be coordinating our break-in from the SUV, which leaves Jamiya and Gwen to keep an eye on things here." Ianto glanced across the Hub, where a very-pregnant Gwen was shuffling paperwork at her desk. "Gwen's been mad with boredom since I took her off field work. She's itching for an excuse to get back out in the field, which means if there's so much as a blip on the rift monitor, she'll take off to investigate it. Stay here and stop her from doing anything dangerous. She'll listen to you, and even if she doesn't, you can at least protect her."

Jack gave a mock salute. "Mission accepted, sir."

Ianto regarded him with an inscrutable expression before collecting his coffee and heading to his office.

When he'd gone, Jack spotted his blue and white mug still sitting empty on the bench.

* * *

The rift remained unnaturally quiet for most of the day while the away team was in Swansea. Jack wasn't sure how he felt about that; he was glad that there were no immediate crises to deal with—especially with only Gwen and his mother as backup, as he was reluctant to lead either of them into a combat situation—but the inactivity was draining in its own way. Jack's mind churned repeatedly through the previous night's disastrous conversation with Ianto, wearing new paths of regret and uncertainty. He rehearsed a dozen ways to explain himself or apologize, but each one left him doubting whether Ianto would accept it.

Gwen and Jamiya provided some distraction, telling him about the things he'd missed and describing interesting cases they'd worked on, but by late afternoon, the rift monitor had still not emitted so much as a chirp, and they were all beginning to chafe with boredom. Jamiya ascended to the hothouse to tend to some plants she was growing, and Jack found himself idly flipping through old case files to keep his mind off all the ways his conversation with Ianto could go wrong.

"I'm famished," Gwen said suddenly. She kicked away from her desk, letting her chair rotate slowly on its pedestal. "Who's up for an early tea?"

Jack grinned over at her from what was now Martha's desk. "Can I get you something? Pickles? Peanut butter? Ice cream?"

Gwen crumpled a supply form into a ball and threw it at him. "Wanker. I haven't had cravings since the first trimester. This little guy could do with a lamb biryani, though." She patted her rounded belly. "That Indian takeaway stand over by the Red Dragon Centre does a good one."

Jack retrieved the paper wad he'd dodged and dropped it into the bin. He didn't want to risk annoying Ianto by leaving rubbish around the Hub. "Far be it from me to stand between a pregnant woman and what she wants to eat. Do they deliver?" He reached for the phone.

"No, but it's only ten minutes' walk. Will do me good to stretch my legs." She stood and wriggled into her jacket.

Jack hesitated. "You want me to come with you?"

"You hungry?"

"Not really, but…" Jack shrugged. "Just in case."

Gwen rolled her eyes. "Jack, I'm pregnant, not helpless. I'm perfectly capable of walking to the shops and back on my own."

"I know you are. It's just that…" He tried to think of something he could say that wouldn't sound patronizing. He was already on thin ice with Ianto; he didn't dare incur Gwen's wrath as well.

Gwen's eyes narrowed. "Wait. Did Ianto say something to you?"

Jack tried to keep his shrug casual. "He just asked me to get between you and any, you know, Weevils. Or bullets. Or anything dangerous."

"I thought so. He's convinced I'm made of glass. Keeps giving me the desk jobs instead of letting me go out in the field." She shook her head. "As though I don't have years of police training and Torchwood experience. I know how to handle myself."

"You can't blame him for being worried," Jack pointed out. "There is a certain amount of risk in what we do, and you're…" He gestured to her obvious condition. "_You_ may be tough, but babies are pretty fragile. All it takes is a bad fall, or somebody shooting at us, and…"

"Believe me, Jack, I know. Which is why I haven't fought him on it as much as I want to. But women have been having babies for thousands of years, and if you think carrying a passenger in the front seat is going to stop me from living a normal life and doing things for myself, you've grossly misjudged me." She scooped up her purse. "I'll be back in half an hour. Call me if anything happens before then."


	22. Chapter 22

Gwen had been gone only ten minutes when the day's allotment of excitement descended in one mad explosion.

The door alarm shrieked, and when the cog wheel rolled back, Ianto and Mickey staggered in with John Hart hobbling between them, his arms draped over their shoulders. A dark stain spread over one side of his clothing from hip to knee.

Before Jack or Jamiya could react, Martha bolted around the trio in the doorway and dashed ahead of them to the medical bay. "Bring him down here," she called. "Jamiya! Help me prep the table."

Jack hovered nearby, unsure which group needed his help. "What happened?"

"What's it look like?" Hart hissed weakly. "Got shot." They reached the stairs, and he grimaced as he tried to put weight on his leg. It buckled, and Mickey caught him before he tumbled down the steps. "Shit."

"Here, let me." Jack took Hart's weight from Ianto, then bent and scooped Hart into his arms, careful not to jostle his injured side. He navigated the entry steps, made his way to the medical bay and began feeling his way down the stairs to the lower level, tracing each step to the edge with his toes. "Mickey, watch the clearance on my left. Don't want to crack his skull into anything." He grinned down at Hart. "Not that there's much to damage up there, right?"

"Your attempt to employ humor to make me feel better is noted," Hart muttered between ragged breaths, "but unsuccessful. Shut the hell up."

Jack laid him carefully on the table Jamiya had just cleaned. "How bad is it?" he asked Martha.

"Not fatal, as long as he doesn't do anything stupid. I got to him in time. But I've got to stitch him up and replace this field dressing." She lifted Hart's shirt and began peeling back the layers of gauze covering the wound. "The hour's ride back in the SUV didn't help matters any. He should have had treatment right away."

"Aren't there half a dozen hospitals around Swansea?" Jack shifted out of Martha's way as she worked. "If it's that serious, couldn't you have taken him to one of those?"

Hart laughed, though it was little more than a grimace and a cough. "I… may be in poor standing with some of the hospitals around here."

"Every NHS facility has him on a watch list," Ianto said, descending the stairs. He paused at the sink to lave the blood from his hands. "Something about illegal entry, opioids, and unauthorized use of medical equipment. It has taken a staggering amount of paperwork to keep him out of prison, and he's technically on probationary release under Torchwood's purview. If he were admitted to a public hospital, there's no guarantee they would release him into our care again."

Jack sighed. "Somehow, this doesn't even surprise me."

Hart grinned weakly. "I am what I am."

"Which is all kinds of trouble," Jamiya declared, though the barb was tempered with obvious concern.

"All right, enough talking," Martha said. "Everyone out and let me work."

They all filed up the stairs, but Mickey and Ianto veered off toward the door again. "Where are you going?" Jack asked.

"To park the car," Ianto said dryly.

"And to get the caveman." Mickey pointed upward. "Left him in the SUV out front."

Jack tried to process this, but the only words supplied by his brain were, "Do you need help?"

"Nah, we can manage. But you might want to clear off a table or something. We've gotta put him down someplace, and I don't think John will want to share his bed." Mickey chuckled. "Probably the _only _thing we've found that John wouldn't share his bed with."

Jamiya collected a few things from a rolling cart near the kitchenette and started toward the door that led to the garage. "And where are _you_ going?" Jack asked.

She brandished the box she was carrying, which turned out to be full of cleaning supplies. "John was bleeding pretty heavily. I'm going to get started on the SUV interior once they've parked."

Jack frowned. "You shouldn't have to do that."

"If I don't, Ianto will, and he has more important things to focus on right now. Besides, it will give me something to do besides hover around here and worry." She vanished through the door.

Jack busied himself by retrieving a folding cot from the recovery room and setting it up in the narrow space between desks. He sent Gwen a text to let her know what had happened, then returned to the medical bay to watch Martha finish treating Hart's wounds.

Hart saw him hanging over the railing above and waved foggily, his face wearing the vapid grin of the anaesthetized. Jack waved back. Martha followed the exchange and rolled her eyes. "The worst thing is, he's probably _thrilled_ to be on these kind of drugs."

"He never met a substance he didn't try to get high on." Jack watched her work for a few minutes, leaning on his arms.

Perhaps it was the change in angle, but the dull pain that had nagged at him ever since his fall on the alien planet gradually crept in at his temple and pulsed into the space behind his right eye. He wasn't aware of reacting, but he must have made some kind of sound, because suddenly he heard Martha's voice calling to him. "Jack!" she repeated. "What's wrong?"

Jack removed the hand that he'd unconsciously pressed over his eye and blinked experimentally. "Just that headache again. It comes and goes."

Martha was frowning up at him. "Maybe there's some damage I missed. I can take another look if you like."

Jack carefully shook his head. "It's just residual pain from that crack on the head. It happens sometimes, with serious injuries. More annoying than anything."

"You want something for it? I've got some pretty strong analgesics down here."

Jack started to decline, then decided there was no good reason he shouldn't take something for the pain. "Sure. Which cupboard?"

Martha pointed toward a cabinet and swiveled one hip toward him as he descended the stairs. "The key's in my pocket."

Jack fished the key out of Martha's lab coat and retrieved the bottle of pills she indicated. After returning the key to her pocket, he peered over her shoulder at John Hart, who was pale but apparently blissfully unaware of the surgery being performed on his lower abdomen. "He _is_ going to be okay? You weren't just saying that to keep his spirits up?"

"I don't lie to my patients, Jack." Martha shot him a dark look before returning to her suturing. "He should recover fully in a few weeks. The bullet ricocheted off the top of his pelvis and clipped the intestine, but just missed the liver. Clean exit. He was lucky they were firing full metal jacket, though; it would have been a very different story with expanding ammunition." She tied off the last suture, clipped it, and laid a clean gauze pad over the wound site. "And done."

She seemed to deflate then, and Jack watched with concern as she leaned heavily on the table, breathing deeply. "You okay?" he asked after a moment.

Martha shook her head slowly. "Just… today has been…" She blew out a long breath.

Jack held out the bottle of pills. "You need one of these?"

"It wouldn't help." She stripped off her gloves and went to the sink to wash her hands. "John was the last one out of the complex. When the guards started shooting, we fired back to give him some cover. John went down, and I…" She turned off the water, but let her hands drip into the sink. "I shot the man who had shot him."

"That's what you had to do, isn't it?"

"Maybe." She sighed. "But I didn't become a doctor to hurt people. Certainly not to kill them. I know it's necessary to use force sometimes, and it's all for the greater good of humanity, but it still doesn't sit well with me." She dried her hands on a paper towel. "I don't even know if that man is alive or not. I think I hit him in the shoulder, but he still could have bled out. I'll never know."

"Nor should you have to." Jack came closer and put a hand on Martha's shoulder. "That man _chose_ to be there. He chose to fire his gun, as much as you did. It's not your fault."

"I know. I know all this, Jack. I've been through it a dozen times before." She chucked the used towel emphatically in the bin. "I can circle in philosophical arguments all day. Still doesn't mean I _like_ it."

"Good. I'd be really worried if you did." He shoved his hands in his pockets. "You were right, you know."

"About what?"

"What you said to me… oh, five years ago, I guess. About how the Doctor wouldn't like my solution to everything."

Martha shook her head. "Working here, though, I can see your side of it. There isn't always a simple solution, no matter how easy the Doctor made it look to save everyone."

Jack laughed. "I don't know about your time in the TARDIS, but I don't recall anything he did being _easy_."

"True," she grinned. "Good cardio, though, all that running." She turned and leaned back against the sink. "You know, I sort of miss it. It was insane and chaotic and exhausting, but there was something about life with the Doctor… everything seemed _cleaner_, somehow. With him, you always believed you could find a way to help people. Like no matter how bad it got, there was always that one sliver of hope to cling to."

"I know what you mean." Jack reached around Martha to fill a paper cup from the tap. "When I took over, I wanted to remake Torchwood with that mindset, but it never really caught on. Not a lot of hope to hang on to around here."

"Oh, I don't know." Martha gave him an appraising look. "Now that you're back, things aren't so bleak."

Jack raised an eyebrow as he swallowed two of the pain capsules. "I thought I was the one with the poor outlook."

She shrugged. "That's not the way the others see you. Listening to them, it's almost like…" She frowned thoughtfully. "Like you're their Doctor. The one who gives them that hope."

Jack tried to digest that. "I've certainly made the same mistakes he did."

"What do you mean?"

He smiled grimly. "I disappeared for years and left them behind."

"It wasn't your fault, Jack."

"I know that. But there's a difference between knowing something intellectually and dealing with it emotionally."

Martha raised an eyebrow. "Seems to me I said something to that effect just a minute ago."

"I guess that's the first philosophical circle complete."

"Let's make it the last. I don't have the energy for any more debates." She sighed and glanced around the medical bay. "I guess we should get prepared for our prehistoric guest. Where should we put him?"

Jack pointed up the stairs. "I brought a cot up. Not much room up there, though."

"Let's move it down here, then."

Jack looked at Hart, stretched out on the metal table. "What about him?"

Martha gave the autopsy table a firm shove, and it rolled on its casters to rest against the opposite wall. Hart gave a faint grunt as it bumped against the bricks, then returned to his semi-delirious state. "Sorted."

Jack laughed. "I haven't seen bedside manner like that since Owen Harper."

"It's what comes of working for Torchwood." Martha glanced over at her patient. "Or maybe just being around John Hart."

Ianto and Mickey returned just as they finished preparing the cot, and Jack stood aside as they carried the body down the stairs, supported by a blanket stretched between them. A few steps from the end, the corner of the blanket in Ianto's left hand slipped, and the body started to tumble. "Careful!" Mickey shouted. Jack dove forward and got an arm under the body before it hit the floor, and together they hefted it onto the cot.

Ianto handed the blanket off to Mickey. He started to put a hand to his left shoulder, then hesitated and tucked his hands into his pockets instead. Jack caught the surreptitious glance he threw at Martha.

Martha was fully focused on the body, and hadn't looked at Ianto at all. "He's comatose. No pupillary constriction. Pulse is… erratic."

Jack looked down at the man—or whatever he was—on the cot. Ianto's description had been accurate; he looked like some kind of museum exhibit. The body was slightly smaller than a modern human's, with a gray-bearded face wreathed in deep wrinkles. A wound across his bare chest emitted an eerie glow.

"What happened at the facility?" Jack asked. "How did you get him out?"

"We interrupted the ritual in progress," Ianto replied. "Apparently they started earlier than planned. Rasdall had already removed the—" He gestured vaguely at the glowing spot on the unconscious man's chest. "—relic thing."

"_Definitely_ alien, by the way," Mickey put in. "It was throwing off all sorts of temporal radiation. Totally lit up the scanners."

"We declared ourselves and demanded he hand it over. He tried to stall us, but then the object seemed to become unstable."

"Unstable, how?"

"It's hard to describe. It began… pulsing. Changing the way things looked around it. You could feel a kind of… _pressure_ from it. Almost blew out our handhelds. Rasdall began panicking the longer we told him to hold still, and finally he just grabbed it and shoved it back into our friend's chest, here." Ianto indicated the man on the cot. "After that, the pulsing stopped. Given the way it reacted to being removed, we had no choice but to bring the body along with the relic."

Jack stared down at the unconscious figure. "And you just took him away?"

Ianto smiled grimly. "We had a bit of a fight to get him out. Made quite a mess of Rasdall's facility. Hart had carried in a small plasma detonator, you see."

Jack grimaced. "So much for keeping a low profile. What about Rasdall himself?"

"Didn't make it out, as near as we can tell." Ianto nodded to Hart on the next table. "We couldn't exactly go back in to confirm, once Hart went down. But we can monitor his bank accounts and see what happens. If he did survive, we can track him easily enough."

"So what do I do with this?" Martha peered at the glowing incision. "If it becomes unstable when removed, I don't want to take it out until we have a better idea of what we're dealing with." She glanced at Ianto, clearly expecting him to give her some kind of instructions.

Ianto glanced at Jack, who got the impression Ianto was relieved not to be the final voice of authority. "What do you think?" Ianto asked him.

Jack rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "If it's giving off temporal radiation, it could react adversely in this proximity to the rift. I wish we had some way to contain…" He started suddenly and clicked his fingers. "Of course! The Doctor! The TARDIS should be able to insulate any kind of temporal device so it doesn't affect this time zone. Let's ask him." He glanced around the Hub. "Wait, where is he? He didn't leave without saying goodbye, did he?"

Martha shook her head. "He was utterly delighted with the terrible monster movie we went to last night, and said he was staying for the whole festival."

Jack laughed. "Oh. How long is it?"

"Thirty-six hours," Martha groaned. "I didn't know there _were_ so many bad movies."

Mickey frowned at her. "_I_ liked them."

Jack glanced at his watch. "Well, assuming he doesn't take any detours, that should put him back here first thing tomorrow morning. Do you think our guest is stable enough to wait that long?"

Martha shrugged. "I'm not getting any dangerous readings, but he's in pretty bad shape. I can try putting him on life support, but I can't guarantee his condition won't deteriorate."

"Just do what you can for him," Ianto told her. "Thanks." He glanced over at Hart. "How is Captain Destructo?"

"Happily hopped up on mind-altering chemicals, which he'll come out of in a couple of hours on his own."

"Stable enough to go home after that?"

Martha nodded. "We'll let Sabine earn her status as a protected alien émigré by serving as his live-in nurse for the next few weeks. He ought to _love_ that."

"At least the timing was good," Mickey offered. "Now Jack's back, we won't be down a man."

Ianto shot an uncertain look at Jack, but quickly looked away. "Right. I'm going to go write up the report from today's adventure. I'll be in my office if you need me." He glanced at Jack again. "Your office. Someone's office."

He retreated up the stairs. Jack waited just long enough to make it appear that he wasn't running after him before doing just that.


	23. Chapter 23

Ianto was seated at Jack's desk, making notes on a form, when Jack leaned into the office. Ianto raised his head slowly. "Can I do something for you?" he asked wearily.

Jack closed the door behind him before answering. "I wanted to make sure you were okay. I figured there was some reason you didn't want to let on in front of the others."

Weariness turned to wariness in the space of a heartbeat. "Let on what?"

Jack pointed at Ianto's left arm. "You nearly dropped that body, and you've been favoring your arm ever since you got back. What happened? Were you hurt on that raid?"

Ianto sighed and rubbed his right hand over his left shoulder joint. "It's nothing serious. One of Rasdall's guards grabbed me on the way out, and I wrenched it pretty hard getting free from him. Think I just pulled something."

Jack was at his side in an instant, tugging at Ianto's jacket collar. "Here, let me see."

"I said it's nothing!" Ianto batted his hand away. "I've had enough soft tissue injuries to recognize a strain. I'll ice it later."

"You'll ice it now. Wait here." Jack ducked out the door and soon returned bearing a bag of frozen peas and a tea towel. "Here. Put this on it."

Ianto eyed the vegetables curiously. "Where did you find that?"

"In the freezer, obviously." Jack grinned. "Probably one of Gwen's failed attempts at a healthier diet. Looks like it expired a year ago, so I don't think there's any reason not to use it for medical purposes."

"You know we _do_ have medical gel packs that are made for this sort of thing."

"I didn't want to interrupt Martha to get one." Jack shrugged. "I mean, if you'd rather I run out and get you a raw steak…"

"No, this will be fine." Ianto slipped carefully out of his jacket and tucked the towel-wrapped peas under the shoulder of his waistcoat to keep it in place. "Thanks."

"We should still have Martha take a look at it when she's finished, make sure it's not the rotator cuff or something."

Ianto shook his head. "Martha doesn't need one more thing to worry about. She's under enough stress as it is."

Jack thought back to his earlier conversation with Martha, but wasn't sure if he'd missed something. "More than the usual?"

Ianto dropped his pen and rolled his neck, wincing as it pulled in the direction of his injured shoulder. "That emergency surgery on Hart, added to whatever is going on with our guest down there… Plus, she had to shoot someone today, and that always upsets her. I don't need to burden her with a minor injury that I can treat myself. The most she can do for me is give me an ice pack and an anti-inflammatory, and I'm halfway there already."

"All the way there." Jack fished the bottle Martha had given him for his headache from his pocket and shook two capsules out on the desk blotter. "Here. I'll bring you some water."

Ianto rolled his eyes, but when Jack returned a moment later with a cup of water, he dutifully swallowed the medicine. "Any other instructions, Doctor Harkness?"

"You need more sleep."

"Truer words," Ianto muttered. "Unfortunately, with Hart out of commission for the next couple of months, I doubt my sleep schedule will improve any time soon."

"You could delegate more."

"To whom?" Ianto sighed. "Gwen's going on maternity leave soon, and I don't want her rushing back here any earlier than necessary; she deserves time with her family, and her children need her. Martha's already doing the jobs of three people. Mickey's good at what he does, but he's happier following orders than giving them. Jamiya is a brilliant technician, but at her age there's a limit to what she can do in the field, and I won't risk putting her in any kind of combat situation."

"I appreciate that." Jack settled himself against one end of the desk and appraised Ianto thoughtfully before adding, "You're a good leader, you know." Ianto huffed a laugh. "I mean it," Jack insisted. "You know your team. You're sensitive to their needs. That's valuable."

Ianto stood and turned to gaze out the round window at the rest of the Hub. "I learned that from you," he said quietly.

Jack shook his head. "You're nicer than I am. I always push everyone too hard."

"You push as hard as they need, because you know their limits better than they do. You challenge them to make them stronger." There was a pause. "It was difficult, sometimes, but we always respected you for it."

Jack didn't miss the use of the past tense. "And now?" He began to shift closer, but stopped when he saw Ianto's shoulders tighten. "I guess I've lost that."

Ianto blew out a breath. "No, you haven't. Gwen would still follow you to the ends of the Earth."

Jack waited. "And you?" he prompted.

"As a leader? Unquestionably."

The words slashed at the threads of Jack's hope. "But not personally."

Ianto half-turned so Jack could just see his raised eyebrow. "I thought we'd agreed to keep our professional relationship separate from whatever happened between us privately."

Jack blinked. "Well, yes, but…"

"Professionally, I'd do anything you required of me. That's what you asked, isn't it?"

"I guess it is." Jack shoved his hands in his pockets to conceal his agitation. "Does that mean you're handing the reins back over to me?"

"Never soon enough," Ianto said fervently. "I never wanted them in the first place."

His vehemence surprised Jack. "You don't like being in charge?"

"I haven't been driving the wagon, so much as trying to keep the horses from running it off a cliff." Ianto's posture wilted, and he adjusted the bag of peas as it started to slide from his shoulder. "I told myself I had to keep Torchwood running until you returned, and I've done that. Now that you're back, I'll make coffee, I'll clean the Hub, I'll retrieve space junk, I'll keep the books, I'll chase Weevils, I'll dispose of the bodies, I'll do anything you need me to do, except be the final voice of authority for this lot."

"Why? Seems like you've done a pretty fair job of leading them in my absence."

"I'm _exhausted, _Jack_._ I can handle the physical demands _or_ the mental strain, but the combined stress is more than I can bear. From now on, I don't want to be responsible for any decision more critical than prioritizing the file protocols."

Jack didn't believe for a second that Ianto wasn't equal to the challenges of running Torchwood, but this weary and vegetable-burdened Ianto presented such a pathetic figure that Jack couldn't have denied him anything in that moment. "All right, if you're sure."

"I'm sure."

"Can I have my office back?"

Ianto didn't even hesitate. "Yes."

Since he'd first seen Ianto's quiet, confident leadership in action, Jack had been expecting more of a challenge to his own authority. Now that things had smoothly reverted to the way they'd been, he found himself at something of a loss. "Okay. I guess I'll, uh, get started putting everything back to…"

Before he could finish speaking, Ianto opened a drawer and unloaded several items that had previously been on Jack's desk. In a matter of seconds, he'd restored the desk to just the way it had looked before Jack left. "Done," Ianto said when he'd finished. The cold pack slipped from his shoulder again, and he tossed it to one side, rotating the joint experimentally. "What else?"

Jack gaped at his handiwork. "You remember how I had everything arranged?" Ianto looked affronted, and Jack shook his head. "Of course you do. Why am I even surprised?"

"Anything else you need, sir?"

Jack knew Ianto had probably meant the honorific to reinforce the newly-restored hierarchy of command, but there was an emotional distance to it that felt uncomfortable in light of their recent estrangement. Jack suddenly knew he couldn't postpone continuing their conversation another day. He quickly glanced around the room. "Could you bring me my hat, please?"

Ianto followed his gaze to the vintage RAF officer's cap hanging on the rack beside Jack's coat. "I moved it," Ianto admitted. "It was getting dusty. Do you want it back on the peg where it was?"

"No, just bring it here." Ianto handed over the cap, and Jack donned it. There was an eerie nostalgia in it; it fit perfectly, having been custom made for him more than sixty years before, but despite the fact that he had practically lived in the matching greatcoat during the intervening decades, he'd rarely worn his cap once the war had ended.

Ianto knew this, and was staring at him with a curious expression. Jack hoped he wasn't about to make a terrible error in judgment.

"This," Jack said, "is my captain hat." He removed it and placed it on the desk. "And I'm taking it off."

Ianto's eyes widened fractionally, and the tension in his shoulders ratcheted back up. "Oh."

Jack leaned back against the desk, keeping his posture as relaxed as possible to demonstrate the lack of pressure. "Can we talk now?"

Ianto sighed. "I suppose there's no point in prolonging the suspense."

"No suspense," Jack assured him. "I just want to apologize about last night. I was out of line. I shouldn't have gotten angry. I was…" He shook his head. "I guess I'm used to being the one who keeps moving on. Coming back here and finding out I'm the one who's been left behind… It really shook me. Not that that's any excuse for the things I said to you."

Ianto nodded, but said nothing.

Jack pressed on before he could lose his nerve to say everything he'd resolved to. "The truth is, I thought a lot about what you said. See, I was only gone a week in my own timeline, but… I missed you. I thought about you every day. And for an instant, last night, when I was afraid you had met someone else…" Jack swallowed. "Well, it wasn't a good feeling. And then I realized you've been feeling that way every day for five years, and everything you said suddenly made sense." He looked down at his hands. "I really didn't give you much to go on with, did I."

"Not so much, no."

Jack flinched. "I'm sorry."

Ianto was staring at him now, the muscles in his neck taut as he waited for the verdict. "So where does this leave us? Because I'm through second-guessing your intentions, Jack. I need you to give me a clear answer."

"I know." Jack pushed off the desk and reached for Ianto's hands, which he allowed Jack to take without resistance. "I don't want you to feel that uncertainty. Whatever promise you need from me, whatever you need to hear me say to make you sure of me, I'll say it. I don't ever want to make you doubt me again."

Ianto's eyes slowly lit with hope, though a shadow of trepidation lingered on his face. "You want to be with me? Still?"

"If you'll have me." Jack tightened his grip on Ianto's fingers. "Exclusively. As long as we're together."

Ianto was scarcely breathing. "Together, meaning…?"

"Dating. Seeing each other. Romantically entangled. Whatever you want to call it; I'm not picky about the terminology. All I know is, I don't want to lose you over some misunderstanding. I…" He nearly faltered as his gaze locked with Ianto's, and he read the mingled hope and fear and pain there. Tears pricked his own eyes and crept into his voice. "I don't want to lose you."

Ianto's arms were suddenly locked around Jack, clinging to him with a desperation that squeezed the air from his lungs. In return Jack cocooned him in a gentle embrace, careful of his injured shoulder, and for a long moment they simply held each other.

"I missed you," Jack whispered.

Ianto released a convulsive breath that was half laugh, half sob. "I think I missed you more."

Jack chuckled. "Longer, maybe." He pressed a kiss into Ianto's hair. "All I could think about was getting back here. To you."

"I was so afraid I'd lost you for good," Ianto murmured into his shoulder. "I couldn't bear the thought of never seeing you again, but I didn't know what I'd do if you came back and didn't want me anymore."

"You never have to worry about that again," Jack promised. "I will always come back for you. And I will always want you."

Ianto pulled back to meet his gaze. "You really mean that, Jack?"

"Of course I do."

"Even if…" Ianto swallowed. "Even when I get older? You'll still want me?"

"With as long as I've lived, do you really think age means _anything_ to me?" Jack framed Ianto's face with his hands. "When I look at you I see _you_, Ianto. Your brilliant mind and beautiful heart. As much as I admire the packaging, it's what's inside that keeps me running back to you."

His words were rewarded with Ianto's radiant smile, which quickly turned playful. "If the packaging doesn't matter, does that mean I can stop wearing suits to work?"

Jack snorted a laugh. "No. I like the suits. Besides, I don't think you'd stop wearing them, even if I told you to." He tugged at the front of Ianto's pinstriped waistcoat. "Even on combat missions, Mr. Jones, Ianto Jones."

Ianto arched an eyebrow at that. "And here I thought you'd be eager to get me out of a suit."

Jack recognized that particular expression of Ianto's, and knew instantly where this conversation was headed. The thought generated a warmth that spread outward from his core. He let his hands roam lightly down Ianto's back. "I'm willing to be convinced, if you have a further argument to present."

"I will gladly show my evidence, but I suggest we withdraw to the judge's chambers." Ianto tipped his head toward the opening in the floor that led to Jack's bunker. "But there's something I need to do first."

"Oh?" Jack hoped whatever it was didn't take long; his body was already urging him to hurry downstairs.

"I haven't welcomed you home properly," Ianto explained. He twined his arms around Jack's neck and tipped their foreheads together. Warmth bled between them, tenderness overlaying the spreading flush of desire. "Welcome home, Jack," Ianto whispered, his voice laden with affection, and kissed him.

Jack sank into the contact as though it had been months, not merely a week, since he'd touched Ianto. The scratch of beard against his face was new, and the novel sensation served to heighten the intensity of each kiss. Jack struggled to exert control over himself, but he had already resolved to let Ianto set the pace for whatever happened between them. As eager as he was to reconnect after his week away, it had been five years for Ianto, and Jack didn't want to rush him into anything he wasn't physically or emotionally prepared for.

As he soon discovered, when they'd wrenched themselves apart for the few seconds necessary to descend the ladder to Jack's quarters, he needn't have worried on that account. Ianto was more than prepared to have him back—in every way possible.


	24. Chapter 24

Ianto latched the door of the morgue drawer and leaned back against it. The cool metal was soothing on his tired shoulders, and he paused to stretch his arms over his head. That triggered a jaw-cracking yawn, but the reminder of sleep was more indulgence than he could permit himself. He blinked the moisture from his eyes and scrubbed his hands over his cheeks, willing himself back to alertness. The grit of stubble scratched his palms, and for a moment he struggled to think back to that morning. Had he shaved today? Had he shaved this _week_? He could scarcely remember what day it was, much less what personal grooming he'd performed.

It had taken some tussling with the Cardiff police to get them to release the body of the latest facehugger victim—a woman, this time—and as usual it had fallen to Ianto to pick it up, transport it, and put it into storage. The woman had been found a short distance from Morrie's, dressed in a tracksuit and expensive trainers, with no wallet and only a loose house key in her pocket. They still had not been able to identify her, though the police had orders to forward any reports of missing persons who matched her general description. Not that who she was really mattered, in terms of Torchwood's procedure; she was dead, and they knew full well what had killed her.

The appearance of yet another casualty underscored how real and immediate the alien threat was. For the last several weeks, Ianto had been preoccupied with Jack's disappearance, and had been approaching the daily running of Torchwood as a task to be checked off so he could focus on the real issue of finding a way to bring Jack back. But the truth was that he and Gwen were the only ones standing between Cardiff and an invasion of unstoppable alien predators, and lately they had been doing a rubbish job of protecting the city. They _had_ to find a way to stop the facehuggers, even if it meant postponing or calling off the search for Jack.

Not that they had made any significant contributions to that endeavor, either. Jamiya had done all the heavy lifting when it came to tracking where Jack might have gone, and even John Hart had proved somewhat useful, but Ianto had felt unskilled and useless ever since he'd watched Jack vanish through the shimmering tear in space. If Jack ever made it home, it certainly wouldn't be due to Ianto's ingenuity. He knew it was absurd to feel guilty that he wasn't able to retrieve someone from an unknown time and location across the galaxy, but awareness of his own powerlessness gnawed at him constantly.

After a few minutes, Ianto realized he was still staring off into space. He pushed away from the wall and wearily climbed the steps to the main level. Gwen and John Hart were sitting near Jamiya's workstation, looking at a waveform on her screen. "I think I've seen this episode," Ianto quipped as he came up behind them.

Gwen grinned up at him. "It's the one where the butler did it."

Ianto cocked an eyebrow. "If 'it' is making the coffee, cleaning up after everyone, and managing the growing collection of corpses in our morgue, then I've not only seen it, I've starred in it." He squinted at the screen. "What are we actually looking at?"

"Some curious results I extrapolated from the latest readings," Jamiya said. "I've been trying to isolate whatever's been interfering with the rift in that location, and I think I've found a signal. It's faint, but comparing the original readings with the later sets I took, the signal seems to be stronger when there's a greater amount of rift activity."

Ianto stared at the waveform, but he found it increasingly difficult to focus on the squiggle, and he wasn't sure he would understand it even if he could see it clearly. "So what does that mean, exactly?"

"It suggests that the signal is originating from beyond the portals and coming _through_ them. Now, it's not necessarily the cause—it could merely be a side effect of the portals opening—but I think there's a possibility that this signal is what is increasing rift activity in that specific location. If we can find out what's sending it, there's a chance—a slim one—that I can interrupt it."

"And if that's the case, disabling the signal could close the portals?"

"Only if I'm right. And that's assuming you even want to pursue this course of action."

"I don't think we have any choice." Gwen glanced up at Ianto for confirmation. "The more of those things that come through, the more casualties there will be."

"Stopping the aliens has to be a priority," Ianto agreed. "We've already displaced an entire community over this, and that's hardly a long-term solution."

"Fair enough," Jamiya said. "Now that I know what I'm looking for, I'd like to take another look at the area behind that restaurant and get some more focused readings."

Ianto nodded and glanced at his watch. The numbers swam in his vision, and it took a moment for the position of the hands to register. "We don't have much daylight left, but I'll get the portable flood lamps from storage and we can go back yet this evening."

Jamiya was frowning at him with a look of concern he'd occasionally seen on his own mother's face. "Are you sure? We can wait until tomorrow. Forgive me for saying, but you don't seem quite up to doing anything else tonight."

"I'd rather not wait if we don't have to. The sooner we find a way to close those portals, the better."

"Ianto, love, you're knackered," Gwen said gently. "Why don't you go home and get some rest? You can even have a lie-in tomorrow morning. I'll drive Jamiya to Morrie's, first thing."

Ianto shook his head. "I should be here in case…" He tried to remember what it was he was staying for, but his sluggish brain refused to provide an answer. Maybe he really was that tired. "No, maybe you're right. I'm not sure I'm up to the drive. Probably fall asleep at the wheel." He rubbed his burning eyes. "I'm not even sure I should drive home."

"Just kip here until you feel awake enough to drive," Gwen suggested. "It's nearly rush hour, so you might as well wait and avoid the traffic, anyway. You could use one of the beds in the recovery room. Or the sofa, if you like. It's more comfortable."

"Ooh! I can recommend a lovely cot downstairs," Hart put in. "Third cell from the left. Slight smell of Weevil. Don't mind any stains I may have left on the bedding, they're—oh, wait, I forgot, there is no bedding." He kicked his feet up on the desk. "Watch out for puddles, then."

Ianto shoved Hart's feet off the desk as he turned toward Jack's office. "I think I prefer Jack's bed."

"Don't we all." Hart flashed a salacious grin.

Ianto's fingers curled into fists, but he couldn't quite summon the energy to take a swing at Hart's smug face. He settled for flipping him a two-fingered salute as he disappeared into Jack's office.

* * *

_I love you, Jack._

Jack fought upward through the haze of half-sleep and belatedly processed the words he wasn't entirely sure he'd heard. "What?" he mumbled. He thought he'd heard Ianto's voice… Had he been dreaming?

There was no reply, but a warm presence against his back reminded him that Ianto was indeed close by. Jack laid a hand on the arm draped across his waist.

Ianto stirred at the touch, straightening his legs and stretching before returning to spoon position. "Morning," he murmured, his voice rough with sleep. Jack's throat issued a distinctly nonverbal sound, and Ianto raised his head. "Hey. You awake?"

"Sorta." Jack flopped over onto his back, eliciting a grunt of discomfort from Ianto. "Oh. Sorry." He wasn't usually this groggy or uncoordinated, but his head was aching again. It had driven him to attempt sleep the previous night, in hopes of blocking out the unpleasant sensation, and now it seemed to be making him more tired than usual. Constant pain, even at low levels, was always draining.

"We have got to get a bigger bed down here," Ianto groaned when he'd extricated himself from beneath Jack's weight. He rubbed the shoulder he'd injured the previous afternoon. "Or just start going back to mine at night."

Jack closed his eyes again. "This is more conveniently located."

"Maybe, but it's worth a ten-minute commute to not have my feet dangling off the end of the mattress."

"Ten minutes? Thought it was more like twenty, even with my driving."

"I've moved house since you were here last." Ianto held up his wrist to catch the faint light that crept into Jack's bunker. "Ugh. Is it really five o'clock in the morning?"

That snapped Jack fully awake. "Wait. Did I send the others home? Did you?"

"They probably sent themselves home when we disappeared," Ianto said dryly. "Gwen, at least, knows what a closed office door means."

Jack knew Gwen would have shared that information with the rest of the team, if only for their own protection. She'd accidentally walked in on Jack and Ianto more than once, and while they'd always laughed it off, she would want to spare everyone the awkwardness. "I hope you weren't planning on avoiding office gossip this time around."

Ianto huffed a laugh. "John Hart works here, remember? Believe me, our spending the night together will be the _tamest _gossip the Hub has heard in years."

"Tame, eh? Guess I'll have to step up my game." Jack grinned wickedly and reached for Ianto, who dodged and rolled out of the bed.

"Behave," Ianto chided, collecting his clothing from the floor. "I left a lot of work unfinished last night, and we'll have a lot more to do when the others get here."

"That's not for hours, yet! And weren't you complaining about all those short nights?" Jack pouted. "Come back to bed."

"Something tells me you weren't thinking of letting me sleep."

Jack started to protest, but the dull ache in his temple sparked a little hotter, and he winced. Ianto was beside him in a moment. "Jack, what's wrong?"

"It's nothing. Just a headache."

"You don't get headaches."

"I do when I've broken my skull recently. Where are my trousers?"

Ianto found them near the foot of the bed, and Jack retrieved the bottle of pills from the pocket. He swallowed two of them dry and leaned back against the pillow. "What do you need to do before everyone gets here?"

"Write up the reports from yesterday. And the usual daily routine: Maintenance, feeding the menagerie, that sort of thing. That's all still under my purview."

"I can help with that," Jack offered. "Weevils, aquarium, Myfanwy… anybody else get fed?"

"No, that's the lot." Ianto frowned. "Are you sure? If your head is bothering you, maybe you should take it easy."

"I'll be fine," Jack assured him. "A shower, some coffee, a few minutes of passionate snogging, I'll be good as new."

Ianto raised an eyebrow. "Since when does snogging have analgesic properties?"

Jack grinned. "We won't know until we try, will we?"


	25. Chapter 25

The rest of the team, minus John Hart, appeared en masse promptly at nine o'clock. Apparently they had all agreed to meet for breakfast somewhere away from the Hub and then enter together, making as much noise as possible, to prevent anyone from stumbling in on their bosses in a compromising situation.

Gwen gave Jack and Ianto a knowing eyebrow-waggle, while Martha tried too hard to act casual, and Mickey was plainly embarrassed around them. Jamiya beamed at them shamelessly, and whispered privately to Jack that she was happy he'd made the right decision.

Jack looked at Ianto, who somehow seemed even _more _attractive after their passionate reunion, and found it impossible to disagree with her.

The Doctor breezed in a quarter of an hour later, popcorn cup in hand and yet another pair of 3D glasses perched atop his wild hair. "You wouldn't believe what I just saw!" he crowed. "Jack, remember that Velozian that nearly put me into orbit at that nightclub we went to a few days ago? Well, the swamp monster in that last festival film looked _exactly_ like her! I mean, it was missing a couple of limbs, and the lateral cilia were all wrong, but other than that it could have been her twin."

"Nightclub?" Ianto raised an eyebrow in Jack's direction. "Tell me, was this before or after you were stranded in the desert?"

Jack shot the Doctor a dark look, which sailed directly over the Time Lord's head as he bent to look over the railing into the medical bay. "Oh, hello. What's going on down here?"

Jack firmly seized the change of subject. "Actually, I was hoping to talk to you about—"

The Doctor had already bolted down the steps. "Oh, no. No no no no no. No, this is not good, not at all."

Jack hurried after him, with the others following. By the time he reached the lower level, the Doctor was already waving his sonic screwdriver at the ancient man.

"What's not good?" Jack asked.

"It's _wrong_," the Doctor said. "It feels _wrong_."

"What does?"

"Time!" The Doctor paced around the cot. "Something's wrong with the flow of time here. It's…" He tugged at his mop of hair, dislodging the paper glasses. "It's not progressing the way it should. I've felt something like this before, somewhere, only I can't think where. It's just… _wrong_."

Martha joined them at the patient's side. "Isn't that what you said about Jack? At the end of the universe?"

Jack flinched; though he and the Doctor had reconciled, and the Doctor had later apologized, that memory still stung a little.

The Doctor's eyes stretched to their full circumference and landed on Jack. "Jack! _Yes!_ That's it!"

Jack blinked. "What is?"

"This feels wrong in the same way you felt wrong. Well, at first. I've got used to you now; that's why I didn't realize the similarity. And it's not the same; it's more like the same _difference_. The extent to which you feel wrong compared to the natural flow of time is the equivalent of the wrongness of this deviation. But it's not the _same _difference; it's a different difference. But equally wrong, just in a different direction—"

"Doctor!" Jack bellowed. "Slow down. You're not making any sense. Are you saying this… whatever he is… is a fixed point in time?"

"No, Jack, that's absurd. Humans can't be fixed points."

Jack frowned. "You told me I was a fixed point."

"Yes, well. You're a complete anomaly that only happened because Rose mucked about with the power of the time vortex, but that isn't supposed to be possible. And since I'm the only living Time Lord and have what is very likely the only remaining TARDIS in existence, that sort of thing couldn't happen twice. It couldn't." He tugged at his hair again. "I wouldn't let it. I _can__'t_."

"Calm down," Jack told him, though he was feeling far from calm himself. "So if he's not a fixed point, what is he?"

"He's…" The Doctor squinted at the body on the table. "He's _frozen_. Not fixed, exactly, but sort of… stalled out. Glued in place in the time stream."

"And that's different from being a fixed point… how?" Mickey asked.

"It's completely different. A fixed point is always there. It's always the same. You can't change it or remove it. Time is anchored to it. This, whatever this is… it's like a bubble where time _isn__'t_. Time flows around it, but doesn't affect it." He shuddered. "It's unsettling, is what it is."

"So what sort of device could cause that effect?" Ianto joined the conversation. "We think there's an alien artifact embedded in his chest."

The Doctor did something with the sonic screwdriver and frowned at the readings. "Oh, I have a bad feeling about this."

"That's reassuring," Ianto muttered. "What is it?"

"Has anyone actually seen this artifact?"

"I have," Ianto said. "It's a cylinder, a little wider at one end. Gives off a greenish-white light. About this big." He extended his little finger.

"Any markings on it?"

"I didn't get a good look, but it looked like there might have been some circles or something incised on one side."

The Doctor wordlessly went to the nearest computer terminal, waved the sonic screwdriver at it, then typed in a series of commands.

"Oi! What are you doing to my system?" Mickey demanded.

"Syncing it to the TARDIS memory banks," the Doctor said. "Ianto, did it look like this?" He struck a key, and a diagram of an object appeared on the screen.

Ianto nodded. "It looked exactly like that. Even the same kind of markings, I think."

Jack came closer and stared at the image. "Doctor, that looks like Gallifreyan text."

"Because it's Gallifreyan technology." The Doctor's voice had lost its usual boisterous tone. "Very old, very powerful, very _dangerous_ Gallifreyan technology. It was outlawed ages ago."

"What is it?"

"A time extinguisher." The Doctor turned back to the cot and braced his hands on the edge. "It does exactly what I described—takes something out of time. It was originally meant to stop the cores of unstable planets that were on the brink of exploding."

"Why would that be outlawed?" Gwen asked. "Wouldn't stabilizing an exploding planet be a good thing?"

"In theory, depending on how it was used. You see, long ago, there was a rogue faction of Time Lords who thought it would be fun to cultivate alien civilizations the way humans cultivate vegetable gardens. They weren't allowed to interfere in galactic history, so they selected planets that had been destroyed through natural processes, went back in time and froze them just before the critical moment. Then they made those planets their playthings. Kept them out of the time stream, did whatever they wanted with them. When they grew tired of playing, they sent a specially coded signal to disable the time extinguisher, and the planets and everything on them died as all that time caught up with them at once."

An uncomfortable ripple of reaction passed through the assembled group. "That's cruel, and a bit sadistic, but those planets were already doomed," Jack pointed out. "They didn't actually change history."

"No. But it didn't take long for those same Time Lords to figure out they could modify the technology to take _themselves _out of time—not frozen in one moment, like the planets, but selected out from the time stream. They could become gods to whatever worlds they chose, for millennia, without using up their regenerations."

Jack's eyes widened in understanding. "But since Time Lords can already live for thousands of years…"

"It effectively made them immortal." The Doctor shook his head. "That's why it's illegal. But it's _dangerous_ because they didn't plan for a way to turn them off. See, the time extinguishers the Time Lords embedded in themselves aren't substantially different from the ones they stuck in the planets' cores—they just had a smaller range. They were still designed to act on a highly complex system, just a biological one instead of a geological one. The only change they made, for obvious reasons, was to remove the ability to remotely disable them. Problem was, when you take a time extinguisher _out_ of a complex system without disabling it, it just adopts its own system, pulling things out of time until it's reached a range of sufficient complexity. Take it out of a body, it commands an ecosystem. Or a city. It's like a black hole that pulls in time instead of matter. Left alone, a time extinguisher can gradually displace a whole continent from the time stream, bit by bit. Devastating paradoxes. Reapers."

Mickey gave a low whistle. "Well, that explains why this bloke is still alive, if he's got one of those things in his chest."

"It also explains why he aged so dramatically when Rasdall took it out," Ianto said.

The Doctor's head snapped up. "Took it out?"

Ianto nodded. "Just for a few minutes, yesterday. He's aged a lot from the first time I saw him."

"Oh, that's bad. That's very, very bad." The Doctor circled the cot again. "That means the disconnect has already been set in motion. Time is catching up with him. And when it does, the time extinguisher is going to need a new system."

"So what do we do?" Jack asked. "How do we shut it off?"

"Judging by the size, you can't," the Doctor sighed. "This is a personal Time Lord model, not a planet model. There is no shutoff. And unless I'm mistaken, this body is reaching its limit. If it's not given another system to manage by the time this man dies, bad things are going to happen."

"How bad?"

"You're sitting on a temporal rift, Jack." The Doctor leveled a look at him. "Remember what I said about black holes? If this thing isn't contained, it'll tear the rift wide open. _Best_ case scenario, Cardiff is the only city that's destroyed."

Ianto stared at the body on the table. "How long do we have?"

"I'm not sure. Only as long as this body stays alive. As this body shuts down, the time extinguisher will begin affecting things outside of it." The Doctor stretched out a hand toward the body, then jerked it back as though he'd been burned. "It's happening already, at low levels. Probably due to reduced brain function."

Jack looked to Martha. "How long do you think he'll live?"

"Not more than a few days, at best. His condition is deteriorating, and life support can't do more than supplement autonomic systems. His brain will shut down first."

Mickey turned to the Doctor. "Can't you take it somewhere else? Drop it off in deep space or something?"

The Doctor shook his head. "I can't get this thing anywhere near the TARDIS. If it activated while inside, it could kill her."

"Would it kill me?" Jack asked suddenly.

Jamiya seized Jack's arm. "You can't be serious!" she cried. From across the cot, Ianto gazed at him with an equally agonized expression.

"I don't mean it like that," Jack assured them. "I just mean, I'm already immortal. It wouldn't _change_ anything for me if it acted on me the way it did this guy. Can't we just stick this thing in my body, where it can't hurt anything?"

"It wouldn't kill you," the Doctor said, "but I don't think it would work. Fixed points and frozen states are like the opposite poles of a magnet. I think the energy of the time vortex flowing through you would end up repelling it. At best, it would try to freeze everything around you instead of acting on you personally. At worst, it could cause a time storm."

"What about putting it into an animal, or something?" Ianto asked. "What qualifies as a sufficiently advanced system for it to control?"

"It's designed for a Time Lord. That's a bit more complex than humans—two hearts, a lot more neurons, a few other differences. Obviously it's been contained well enough by this poor fellow," the Doctor gazed down at the man on the cot, "but some of the effects probably overflowed onto the people and environment around him."

"Well, that explains the immortality cult," Ianto muttered.

"Though apparently the effects of that overflow weren't too detrimental, or you'd have noticed before now," the Doctor went on. "From the looks of things, I'd say anything less complex than a human brain and body wouldn't be able to satisfy its requirements. Not that you'd want to put it in another human, obviously." The Doctor swept a hand toward the man on the table. "Nobody should wind up like this. Just using that as a benchmark."

"So we can't just feed it to a sheep?" Gwen sighed. "Pity. Plenty of those around."

"But with a sheep, there's also risk that it would get mixed up with other sheep, accidentally sent to market, and then some butcher accidentally triggers the end of the world while filling an order for lamb chops." The Doctor shook his head. "Risky."

"If it's designed for a Time Lord…" Mickey looked at the Doctor and raised his eyebrows.

"Absolutely not," the Doctor snapped. "No Time Lord should have that kind of power. Especially not me. I need the fear of death to keep me… well." He cleared his throat. "I can't."

Jamiya tapped her chin thoughtfully. "Will it work on something synthetic, or does it require a biological interface?"

"It only requires complexity comparable to an advanced brain and body. Natural, synthesized, or mechanized, provided it's a sufficiently advanced system to fully engage its time-stopping powers."

"What about a computer?" Mickey asked.

"Only if it had an advanced logic system—something approaching human thought. Not to mention the required mechanical attributes. Remember, this thing is designed to operate on the approximately forty-two _trillion _cells in a Time Lord's body. Your average twenty-first century i-whatsit won't come close."

"A sufficiently advanced system," Jack repeated. "So we need to find a… a supercomputer, or an extremely complex machine that can safely be removed from the time stream."

"And preferably someplace you can keep a close eye on it, Jack. You're the one best suited to watch over it for the next few thousand years, after all. Wouldn't want another cult getting their hands on it."

Jack nodded. "We should be able to find _something_ with all the resources we have here."

"I hope so." The Doctor tapped his wrist significantly. "Because we're on a dangerously literal clock."


	26. Chapter 26

Flat Holm's atmosphere was more than usually oppressive. An incoming thunderstorm had made the crossing choppy, unsettling Ianto's stomach, and the moisture had seeped into the halls and air of the underground facility, making the chill more tangible. Even the harsh fluorescent lights seemed dimmer today, casting their green-tinged pall over the wasted body on the gurney.

"I miss him," Ianto said quietly. His voice echoed strangely within the containment suit, and he lowered it to a whisper. "I miss him so much."

The only answer was the low hum of the monitoring equipment, interjecting soft whirs and muted beeps at intervals. There had been no real change in the facehugger victim in the week since his last visit to Flat Holm, but Ianto kept glancing at the screens, hoping his presence might trigger some slight reaction in the readout. So far, there had not been so much as a flicker.

"It's worse this time," Ianto went on, speaking aloud as though narrating an entry in his diary. "The first time, when he left with the Doctor, he hadn't—we hadn't—it wasn't like this between us, yet. And the second time, with the Daleks, I was terrified something would happen to him, or to us, and I'd never see him again. But he kept promising he'd come back, and he did. But this time… this wasn't his choice. He was _taken_ from me. And God only knows what's out there, what's keeping him from coming back." Ianto squeezed his eyes shut and swallowed the burn in his throat. "It's not fair," he whispered fiercely. "We'd only just begun to understand one another. And I never even got to tell him how I feel." He gulped a breath, but a sliver of hysterical giggle escaped around it. "Did I tell you that? I only realized last week. I love him. I'm really, truly _in love_ with him. And he doesn't know. Maybe he'll never know." Ianto looked down at his plastic-gloved hands, clasped in his lap. "Even if he comes back, what can I do? It should be so easy to tell him. To just say, 'I love you, Jack,' and have done. But it's not easy. Not when I don't know if he feels the same. Not when he'll live forever, and I'll be lucky to reach middle age." He shook his head. "That's no excuse, though. He deserves to know that he's loved. I just hope I get the chance to tell him."

His eyes slid to the scarred, emaciated arm lying atop the stark linens, and Ianto gingerly folded the man's bony hand between his. It was becoming a habit to hold this man's hand, though Ianto wasn't entirely sure if it was for the victim's comfort or his own. "Was there someone you loved, I wonder? Someone who loved you? Someone who doesn't know where you went? Maybe someone's out there right now, praying for your safe return, the way I'm praying for Jack's." He sighed bitterly. "I wish I knew who you were. I wish I could help you. Comfort you, at least. Let you know you're not alone." Ianto was silent for a moment, then went on. "You have no idea how much you've helped me just by being here. By… well, I don't suppose you would call it 'listening,' but it feels that way to me. Without you to talk to these past few weeks, I'm not sure how I would have gotten through it all. Thank you."

He checked the monitors again, but they hummed steadily on as before. With another sigh, he stood to go.

Helen was waiting for him outside the decontamination chamber, a clipboard in her hand and a sympathetic smile on her face. "You got your readings?" she asked. It was part of the routine; she pretended Ianto was still coming here for scientific purposes, and Ianto pretended not to notice how she lingered in the hallway, sometimes with tissues when it had been a particularly rough week and he couldn't make it through his self-prescribed therapy sessions without breaking down.

"I got what I needed," Ianto replied, though it was only half true. He'd have counted the session more successful if he'd emerged with anything resembling hope. "Any change in the patient over the last few days?"

Helen shook her head sadly. "It's a slow but marked decline. He's lost another half a kilogram in body weight. We tried a nutrient drip, but with his metabolic function so impaired, it didn't seem to make any difference. I don't think it will be long, now."

The prognosis stabbed through Ianto's gut. He knew it was a miracle the man had survived as long as he had with an alien parasite attached to his face, but he still felt somehow responsible for the victim's welfare. "It's strange," he murmured. "The other victim seemed to have died within just a few days. I wonder why this one…" He gestured vaguely toward the clean room. "Why would that creature be keeping him alive like this? Letting him linger?" He shivered. "It's awful."

"It certainly is. Though I don't know that we can say the creature is _keeping_ him alive. We still don't know exactly what it's doing to him. We know there's been some skull damage, as well as the obvious soft tissue injuries, but we couldn't get a clear brain scan. Every kind of imaging we tried came out murky." She shot him a sidelong glance. "I don't suppose you can tell me more about where that thing came from? What it is—or was, before the, er, government did something to it?"

"Classified, I'm afraid," Ianto said with a tight smile. "Sorry."

Helen rolled her eyes, and not for the first time, Ianto wondered if she still believed that the residents of Flat Holm were all government test subjects. It was getting harder to explain some of the inmates' conditions. Now that he'd brought her a real, live alien, he had no idea how long he could maintain the charade.

They reached the exit, and Helen offered him a hand to shake. "See you in a few days, Mr. Jones."

Ianto nodded as he clasped her hand. "If anything changes—or if it looks like he isn't going to make it—call me."

"I think it's pretty clear he isn't going to make it," Helen said with a sad smile. "The only question is _when_."

* * *

After he returned the Torchwood yacht to its concealed dock, Ianto found a text from Gwen saying that they were back at Morrie's to follow up another rift surge. He went through to the garage, set his Audi's SatNav and mechanically followed the directions through the city, keeping his mind as blank as possible. For just a few minutes, he didn't want to think about _anything_.

It didn't work, of course. As soon as he stopped concentrating on nothing, Jack entered his thoughts. Jack's smile, Jack's touch, the little crease between Jack's brows that appeared when he was worried about something. All the ways Ianto had found to make that crease disappear.

Ianto sighed and began making a to-do list to distract himself. It wasn't difficult to think of line items for it; he'd been falling steadily behind schedule for weeks, even since before Jack had gone missing.

"How'd it go?" Gwen asked when he finally joined them behind the closed diner. "Any change in the patient?"

Ianto shrugged. He appreciated Gwen's concern, but his therapeutic visits to Flat Holm were something he preferred to keep private. "Nothing new. What have we got here?"

"We're making progress, I think." Jamiya was standing over John Hart, who was crouched in the gravel holding a device that was connected via cable to a pair of scanners staked at each corner of the lot. "I've isolated a signal. Now we're just trying to triangulate it."

"Tricky, when it's bleeding through a hole in the fabric of reality." Hart pointed in the direction of one of the shimmering places in the air. "I think it's that one."

Jamiya checked readings on the PDA she held and nodded. "I think you're right. All three tests have had stronger signal when that portal is active."

"That's the place Jack fell through." Ianto crossed to where they stood, keeping a wary eye on the fluctuating rift openings. "What kind of signal?"

"One that doesn't belong on Earth in this century," Jamiya answered. "Though that goes without saying. It's a Delico interface. Older tech, mostly used for early matter transport systems."

"Like Bluetooth for teleporters," Gwen volunteered. "I looked it up in our database. There was only a two-sentence entry, but that's what it sounded like to me."

Ianto made a mental note to update their records and peered at Jamiya's scanner. A cloud that vaguely resembled a heat map was displayed on the screen. "So what are we looking at?"

"I knocked together an imaging system, so we can track the signal geographically. It's strongest in this area." She indicated the corner near the bins, where Jack had fallen through the rift.

The heat map image faded, and Gwen checked her own PDA. "The rift surge is tapering off. Did we get the data we needed?"

"Yes and no," Jamiya sighed. "We know what kind of signal, where it's coming from, and that it's likely exacerbating the rift activity here. We still don't know _why _there's a strong connection to this place and time, though. And we can't disable it until we can find what it's connected to."

Hart stood and dusted off his knees. "Delico is almost impossible to jam; that's why it was used as a carrier signal for the old analog-stream transmats. There's got to be something connecting it directly to the source."

"Like a transmitter, you mean?"

"Like a receiver. The signal is unidirectional." He began to prowl the area near the bins. "Tell me if you detect any incoming rift activity. I don't want to go after Jack the long way."

"We could tie a rope to your ankle and shove you through," Ianto suggested dryly. "Like a fishing line. Reel you in when you find Jack."

Hart scowled over his shoulder. "Remind me why I'm helping you people, again?"

"Because it's how you earn your daily substance-abuse allowance."

Hart turned back around and stopped short. He checked the scanner in his hand, then let out a low whistle. "Well, you can pay up for the week. I've just earned it."

Gwen and Ianto exchanged glances and hurried over. "What did you find?"

Hart pointed to a crate shoved back against the exterior wall of the diner, barely visible behind the skip bin. It seemed to have been sheared in half, revealing its contents of red-hued metal hardware.

"That's that space metal you found, isn't it?" Gwen peered at it and hesitantly extended a hand. "It shouldn't be here. Is it safe to touch it?"

"Under ordinary circumstances, it would be. But look closer." Hart pointed at the base. The bottom edge of the box hovered a centimeter off the ground. A few bits of metal had spilled out of it and were scattered across the gravel.

"Seems to me a box full of metal should _not _be defying gravity." Ianto crouched for a closer look. "What's causing that?"

"I think it's an interrupted matter transfer. Caught in stasis, halfway through rematerialization. That explains the constant Delico signal—if it's a transmat beam, it can't disconnect as long as it's linking the two halves of the same object. It's a quantum bridge."

"How does that happen?"

Hart shrugged. "Malfunction of some kind. No way to tell from this end."

Jamiya joined them. "That must be what's causing this portal to keep opening in the exact same spot. Unless we can shut off the signal, it's going to continue indefinitely."

"So what do we do?" Gwen asked. "Toss the box back into the rift to rematerialize somewhere else?"

Jamiya shook her head. "Not if this is the programmed destination. If the output is set to this location, I think the transmat will keep attempting to connect to this space, regardless of where the matter itself is."

"Who would set a transmat to beam a box of bolts to a diner in Llandaff?"

"They probably didn't. If the other end of the rift opened up wherever the actual transmat destination was set, the beam could have fallen through the hole in space just like anything else. That might have caused whatever feedback damaged the system in the first place." She sighed. "But it doesn't help us to speculate how the malfunction happened. We need to find a way to cancel it out."

"Preferably before more of those facehugger things come through," Gwen added. "I suppose it's too much to hope that we could find a way to fetch Jack back through first?"

Ianto thought of the emaciated man he'd left at Flat Holm, and of the multiple mutilated bodies he'd sealed in the morgue, and shuddered. "If he hasn't come back through by now, he probably isn't going to. Stopping those parasites has to be our top priority." It was difficult to say the words, even though he knew they were true. "That's what Jack would want us to do."


	27. Chapter 27

Jack dropped the receiver back into the cradle and rubbed a hand over his face. He'd spent the entire afternoon on the phone with various national and international security agencies, trying to commandeer some kind of system that met the Doctor's specifications to house the time extinguisher. Unsurprisingly, no organization was quite prepared to hand over a human intelligence-level supercomputer to be sacrificed to an alien device. Even the promise of reimbursement from the crown couldn't convince them; anyone with a device that would fulfill their needs tended to be _using _it, and couldn't possibly replace it within a couple of days.

Jack pushed to his feet and stretched the knots from his back. He'd been sitting too long, fretting too long, staring at his telephone too long. He needed to move around, circulate the blood, maybe have a cup of Ianto's coffee…

Hushed voices reached him as he emerged from his office, and Jack looked around curiously. At last he traced the sound to the lower level, somewhere beneath the metal walkway that crossed the tidal pools. Jack leaned on the railing, about to call down to the speaker, when the words he heard gave him pause.

"I don't like it," the Doctor was saying. "I don't like it at all."

"But it could be done?" Ianto's voice was insistent.

"It could, yes. But the ramifications…" Jack could envision the Doctor shaking his head, hair swaying wildly. "I can't condone it."

"We may not have a choice."

"_You _have a choice," the Doctor insisted. "But you may lose it, if you do this. I can't predict what will happen."

"It's better than the alternative."

"On a global scale, yes, but not a personal one." The Doctor sighed. "Fortunately, there's still time. It may not be necessary."

"Time for what?" Jack interrupted, finally hanging over the railing to spot them.

The Doctor started and looked almost guilty, but Ianto shifted his gaze up to Jack without hesitation. "Temporarily housing the time extinguisher in a human body," he said.

"A human body?"

"A volunteer who wouldn't mind being held in stasis. A terminal patient, for example. It could buy us some time."

Jack frowned. "Freezing someone just at the point of death doesn't sound like something you'd be in favor of, Ianto."

Ianto shrugged. "Normally, you'd be right. But facing the end of the world—or at least the end of Cardiff—puts medical ethics into a slightly different perspective. Ethically, we're obligated to do whatever is necessary to save the greatest number of people."

Before Jack could decide whether that argument could be countered, Mickey bolted up the steps from the medical bay. "Hey, Jack. You got a minute?"

Jack nodded. "What is it?"

"Martha wants a word."

Jack followed him to the medical bay, trailed by Ianto and the Doctor once they'd returned to the main level. Martha and Jamiya stood on either side of the autopsy table, where they'd moved the prehistoric man once John Hart had been sent home. "I wanted to give you an update on our patient's condition," Martha told him.

Jack frowned at her serious expression. "Something tells me you aren't going to report a miraculous recovery."

"Afraid not." Martha tapped something on the tablet she held and swiveled it to show Jack. "His vitals have been deteriorating ever since we brought him in."

Jack glanced over the pulse rate, oxygen levels, and other benchmarks. "How long have we got?"

"At his current rate of decline, I don't think we have more than two days at the outside."

Jack turned to the Doctor. "And if he dies before we have another host ready?"

"Then the time extinguisher latches on to something else," the Doctor said grimly. "It's hard to say what it will prioritize. It could be your advanced computer system; it could just be whoever is standing nearest. Or it could cause a wide-scale temporal collapse and pull the rift open like a sinkhole under a car park."

Jack stared down at the unconscious man on the table. His beard had grown white and scraggly overnight, and his skin was newly mottled with age marks. He'd looked elderly when Ianto and the others had brought him in; now, he looked positively ancient. It wasn't difficult to imagine the progression to deceased in the very near future.

Somewhere up in the Hub, a telephone rang. A moment later Gwen appeared at the rail. "Jack, there's an Andrei Fedyaev from the KVI on the line for you. He says he's returning your message. Something about the specs on a decommissioned missile guidance system?"

"I'll take it in my office," Jack called.

"Scavenging cold war leftovers?" Ianto asked.

Jack shrugged. "We aren't in a position to be picky. Let's just hope it meets our minimum system requirements."

* * *

Jack was still in his office late that evening when Ianto entered, bearing a cup of coffee and a sandwich on a tray.

Jack looked up and raised his eyebrows. "I thought you'd graduated from food and beverage service."

Ianto deposited the food near Jack's elbow. "I have, but everyone else has gone home, and I didn't think you'd eaten anything."

"I haven't. Thanks." Jack returned his attention to the old address book in which he was crossing off all the telephone numbers he'd tried so far.

Ianto glanced over his shoulder at the directory, which now had more numbers crossed out than not. "Any luck with the KVI?"

"They didn't have what we need." Jack dropped his pen and slumped back in his chair. "Nor did the CIA, AIC, CSIS, CBI, IMF, DGSE, or any of the two dozen other official or clandestine agencies I've tried. I've called in every favor I have going back to the 1980s, but no one has the kind of equipment we're looking for." He rubbed his eyes, then glanced up at Ianto. "I'm assuming UNIT was no help?"

"They don't have any complex logic systems they can do without. I've asked them to go through their warehouse for possible alien hardware and get back to me, but when I gave them the minimum specifications, they didn't sound optimistic."

"I'm not surprised. Like us, they either would have scavenged anything with that kind of processing power and put it to use themselves, or destroyed it to _keep_ it from being put to use. Finding something as complex as what we need that's also expendable is going to take a miracle. The Time Lord brain is a hell of a computer."

Ianto shrugged and leaned against Jack's desk. "So is the human one, for that matter. It's beginning to look as though that may be our only option."

Jack didn't answer, and Ianto watched him for a moment before sighing and setting aside his tray. "You're cross with me."

Jack glanced up. "Why would I be?"

"For suggesting we put that thing into a person."

"That's not it."

"But I got the distinct impression you don't approve."

"Oh, I definitely don't approve," Jack said. "I'm dead against the idea. But that doesn't mean I'm upset with you."

Ianto looked relieved. "I was worried we might still be on thin ice, after… well."

"We're keeping our professional and private lives separate, right?" Jack reached over to pat Ianto's thigh. "I know the lines blur sometimes, but I don't want Torchwood business to come between us. And this is definitely a Torchwood thing."

Ianto nodded. "So—personally or professionally—what bothers you so much about the idea?"

Jack sighed and stared pensively into his coffee. "I don't know what the ideal solution is, but sacrificing someone to the time extinguisher is the farthest thing from it I can think of."

Ianto gave him a thoughtful look. "I don't understand. You've made the hard decision before. Several times."

"And the last time I suggested it, Martha laid into me. I can't imagine the Doctor going along with it, either."

"Is his opinion so important to you?"

"Ultimately, no," Jack admitted. "But in this case, I agree with him."

"I think it could buy us some time, if we found the right candidate."

"Like a terminal patient? Someone who's going to die anyway, so it doesn't matter if we kill them?" Jack heard the bitterness in his own voice.

Ianto shook his head. "I'm not suggesting we spring it on some unsuspecting victim. There would be full disclosure up front."

"And you think you'll find a volunteer, once they know what's involved?" Jack gestured in agitation. "We promise them more time—a month, a year, however long it takes us to find or build a permanent housing for the time extinguisher. Then we yank it back out of them, and they die."

Ianto shrugged. "There are loads of people who would be _thrilled_ to postpone death for that long."

"There's a big difference between delaying death, and removing the possibility entirely."

Understanding dawned on Ianto's face. "Ah. So _that__'s_ what this is about."

Jack froze. "What?"

"I wondered why you seemed to be taking this so personally. You don't want to risk someone else becoming trapped in time, is that it?"

Jack scrubbed a hand over his face. "I guess it is. I mean, you saw that man out there. He's probably been alive—if you can call it that—for thousands of years. What if something went wrong? What if we can't find something to contain the time extinguisher?" He shuddered. "We can't take the chance of anyone else becoming like… whatever I am. It's too risky."

"Even if they know about it in advance? Even if it's their own choice?"

Jack heaved a deep breath. "It's impossible to know what it's like until you've lived it. I wouldn't wish eternity on _anyone_."

"Perhaps," Ianto acknowledged. "But when someone is dying, you can't blame them for wanting to have a little more time with the people they love."

Jack gazed at Ianto for a long moment before answering. "No. No, I guess I can't." He reached over to take one of Ianto's hands. "But _I_ know better, Ianto. I know the worst case scenario, and I can't justify taking that risk."

Ianto covered Jack's hand with his own. "All right. We won't discuss it any further. For now, what else can be done? Any more phone calls I can make? Research that needs doing?"

Jack poked morosely at his address book with his free hand. "I don't know. We've got to do _something_, but I'm running out of numbers to call, and I'm fresh out of ideas. I don't even know what else to try."

Ianto released Jack's hand to nudge the sandwich plate closer. "You should eat something, then. Fuel the brain."

Jack realized he was actually quite hungry, and took a bite of the proffered food. He held up the sandwich and nodded in approval. It shouldn't have been a surprise that Ianto had remembered exactly what he liked on his sandwiches, but Jack was constantly amazed at the details Ianto carried around in his head.

Ianto chuckled at his reaction. "I thought you would. You're welcome."

Jack scarfed down the remainder of the sandwich, and noted that he _did _feel better, almost immediately—even the faint, ever-present headache seemed less noticeable now that he had food in his stomach. "Okay, that's one good idea," Jack said around a final mouthful of partially-masticated roast beef. Ianto gave him a reproving look, and Jack washed it down with a swig of coffee before speaking again. "Got any more brilliant suggestions?"

Ianto assumed an attitude of serious thought. "You've been sitting at your desk for quite some time. They do say brain function is improved by engaging in periodic short bursts of vigorous exercise."

"Oh?" Jack leaned forward. "What sort of exercise?"

"Oh, anything that raises the heart rate, I should think." Ianto returned his gaze with studied innocence, but his fingers trailed suggestively along Jack's forearm. "Perhaps we should try an experiment to see if we can, ah, increase blood flow?"

Jack glanced longingly at the hatch that led to his quarters. "As much as I'd enjoy an exercise break, I'm not sure it would get us any closer to solving our problem."

"You're not getting any closer sitting here staring at your desk, either," Ianto pointed out. "And there is such a thing as altering routine to improve efficiency."

"Fair point." Jack grinned. "Ianto Jones, I approve of the way you manage an office."

"Oh?" Ianto raised an eyebrow. "Is _that _what we're calling it these days."


	28. Chapter 28

Ianto stared into the empty space between himself and the weather-stained brick wall. "You're sure this is going to work?"

Jamiya rocked back on her heels and looked up at him. "Only about sixty-five percent. Which is pretty good odds when dealing with time-space portals, malfunctioning transmat beams, and a host of unknown variables."

Gwen put a hand on his arm. "Ianto, it's the best chance we've got of eliminating those things."

"I know. I just…" Ianto raked a hand through his hair. "I wish we had a way to reach Jack before sealing off the only passage between wherever he is and here."

"So do I. But you said yourself that this is what Jack would want us to do."

"Yeah," Ianto sighed. "Yeah, it is."

John Hart finished locking a tripod in place and stepped back, dusting his hands. "That's the transmitter done. We just need to calibrate it."

Jamiya pushed to her feet and grimaced as her knees cracked. "Field work was easier when I was younger," she groused. She waved off Ianto's offered hand. "No, really, I'm fine. Can you bring me that equipment bag over there, though? I'd rather not lift it."

Ianto hefted the bag of electronics and delivered it to an open patch of gravel beside the tripod. Jamiya plugged in a device from the bag and began fine-tuning some settings on the transmitter. Ianto stood a few paces away, waiting for more instructions and feeling vaguely useless.

Gwen exchanged a look with him, apparently feeling the same. "It's different this time, isn't it?" she murmured quietly.

Ianto raised an eyebrow. "What is?"

"When Jack disappeared before, Tosh stepped down because she said she was compromised, and Owen and I kept arguing over who would lead the team, remember?"

Ianto smiled wryly. "How could I forget? The way you two carried on was like two primary schoolers fighting over the same football."

Gwen shot him a dark look. "We were not either."

"Remember that shouting match you got in over who was going to drive the SUV?"

"That was—" Gwen scowled. "Owen was being unreasonable."

"If you say so."

"In any case," Gwen said, nodding toward Jamiya, "now it's just the two of us. I find it curious that without even discussing it, somehow both of us have deferred to someone who's not even officially Torchwood."

"But she is Jack's mother," Ianto pointed out. "And we saw Jack hop to do what she said. So that's something."

"I'm still not sure that gives her an official position of authority."

"What's your point?"

Gwen shrugged. "I just wondered how this all works, officially speaking. Since we seem to have done away with the usual system of authority."

Ianto considered the question. "Well, she knows a lot more about this anomaly and how to fix it than we do. Let's consider her a specialist adjunct, granted a position of temporary oversight on this case."

"Fair enough," Gwen said. They stood silently, watching Jamiya calibrate the transmitter she'd built. After a minute, Gwen leaned over to Ianto again. "So who is actually in charge? Officially, I mean?"

"You mean, who's going to take responsibility if this all goes pear-shaped?" Ianto smiled grimly. "I have seniority. I guess it's me."

"You sure? I mean, I've been a field agent longer…"

Ianto rolled his eyes. "Gwen, I don't _care_. It's just the two of us, now. We hardly need a strict hierarchy. But if it makes you happy to be in charge—"

"No, no, I wouldn't want to step on your toes," Gwen said hastily. "I just thought we ought to discuss it at some point." She swallowed. "You know, in case we end up… needing to recruit additional staff."

Ianto tensed. "I don't feel comfortable doing that without Jack's approval."

"Ianto, Jack is somewhere on the other side of the galaxy," Gwen reminded him. "He could be gone for months yet. Years, maybe. I don't like thinking about it any more than you do, but at some point, one of us is going to get hurt, or sick, and we'll need to bring in more people. There has to be some sort of hiring protocol."

"There is," Ianto said reluctantly. "I know how it's done. I processed your employment paperwork, after all."

Gwen looked relieved. "I'm not saying we need to do anything about it right now. I just think maybe we should keep it in mind for the future. If Jack's still gone in a few weeks…" She shrugged.

Ianto didn't want to think about a few more weeks without Jack, and he certainly didn't want to think about what they would do if those weeks dragged on into months, or years. He walked over to Jamiya, the only distraction available at present. "How's it coming? Anything I can do to help?"

Jamiya shook her head. "Just finishing up," she said. "The system will be armed as soon as… There!" The device in her hand beeped, and she waved everyone back from the tripod. "Nobody touch anything," she warned. "The transmitter is calibrated to the micrometer. Is everyone clear?"

Ianto, Gwen and John Hart carefully moved behind the line Jamiya created with her outstretched arms. Once they were out of the sensitive zone, Jamiya picked up the remote device she'd been holding and stared into the air in front of the tripod.

"What next?" Gwen asked.

"Next, we have to wait for a portal opening," Jamiya explained. "According to our calculations, there should be a significant one within the next twenty minutes or so."

Ianto wasn't sure his raw nerves could stand twenty minutes of inactivity. Fortunately, they didn't have to wait that long; after four or five minutes, a shimmer appeared in the air. "There it is!" Ianto said, though everyone could see it clearly.

"Here goes," Jamiya murmured, and pressed a button on the remote.

Ianto wasn't sure what he'd expected—perhaps a glowing ray shooting out of the device on the tripod like something from an old science-fiction movie, piercing the fabric of the portal—but there was no visible response from the transmitter except the blinking of a tiny indicator LED on the side. He watched it for a moment. "Is it working?"

"It's transmitting," Jamiya answered. "We'll know in a few minutes if it's working. The signal I'm sending should loop the transmat beam back to to its source platform, but it will take some time. For safety reasons, transmats are very difficult to disrupt."

"Because you don't want to be beaming down to a planet and suddenly have someone's holovid remote blip and take your legs off," Hart added unnecessarily.

Ianto stared at the opening in the rift. It had started as an iridescent shimmer in the air, but now it was becoming clearer, like a frosted window to another place. He thought he could make out rolling dunes, gleaming in the sun like photographs he'd seen of the Sahara. "I can see _through _it. It's never been like that before."

Jamiya nodded. "The transmission is temporarily stabilizing the opening. Less fluctuation means more light passes through, with less distortion."

"It looks like a desert. Is that where Jack has gone?"

"It's possible. It's likely where the transmat beam originated, at least."

"We could rescue him," Ianto said suddenly, taking a step forward. "I could go through, find him, and bring him back. As long as the signal keeps the portal stable—"

Hart stepped into his path. "That's a suicide trip, Eye Candy," he snapped. "You don't know where that thing opens up. It could be on a planet with gravity that would crush you. It could be a toxic atmosphere. It could be freezing cold."

It galled Ianto that Hart was right; he hadn't so much as considered the danger, once he'd recognized a way to get to Jack. "Then we'll take readings first." He fished a scanner out of the equipment bag.

Hart rolled his eyes. "You can't take environmental readings through a wormhole. For starters, there's no atmosphere to sample. This is just distorted optics—light bent through a straw. Going through is too bloody dangerous. And that's _me_ saying that."

Ianto's fingers tightened on the scanner, and he made to step around Hart. "What do you care about my safety?"

"Nothing!" Hart intercepted him again. "But if you jump through that hole, I'm sure as hell not going to be the one to stick around to tell Jack his boyfriend died of stupidity!"

The word snapped Ianto back to his senses. Hart had never called him Jack's _boyfriend _before. Apart from a few lewd comments, he'd never even acknowledged the relationship between Jack and Ianto—whatever it was.

Hart seemed to realize he'd said something too revealing, for he turned and stalked quickly away. "Do what you like," he growled as he retreated. "If you die, at least Jack will be available again."

Ianto put down the scanner and stepped contritely into his place behind Jamiya. Gwen squeezed his arm, but said nothing.

They waited in anxious silence, counting the minutes, until Gwen suddenly cried, "Look!" Ianto followed her pointing finger to the space behind the bins where the half-materialized crate had sat. It was now empty, save for a few scattered bits of hardware. "Does that mean it's worked?"

"It certainly seems that way." Jamiya picked up the scanner Ianto had removed from the equipment bag and took some readings. "I'm not detecting the Delico signature anymore. I think it must have been successfully redirected."

"Good." Gwen sagged in relief. "So when you turn off the transmitter, what happens?"

"In theory, it should close the portals for good. Now it's only the signal from _this _end holding them open. Once it's disabled, the transmat loop should be contained in its own time and place."

Ianto swallowed hard. "Along with Jack."

Jamiya turned to look at him, and for the first time, Ianto saw the pain and conflict scribed on her own features. He felt a surge of guilt for focusing so much on his own loss; after all, it was Jamiya's son who was missing. "I could leave it open," she ventured, almost hopefully.

Ianto took a deep breath and expelled it, hating the decision he knew he had to make. "No. If it's open, more of those creatures will come through. We have to trust Jack to find a way back to us on his own."

Jamiya nodded and switched off the transmitter. Within seconds, the portal clouded over, shrank, and vanished into thin air.

Jamiya and Gwen began collecting the equipment set up around the vacant lot, but Ianto just stood quietly, staring at the empty place where the portal had been.


	29. Chapter 29

"Jack." Ianto's voice was insistent. "Jack, wake up. You're having a nightmare."

Jack gasped and flailed at the thing that was smothering him, but his hands met no resistance—just Ianto's arms, steadying him the way they often did when he came back to life. Ianto held Jack firmly as he breathed hard and reoriented himself. He was in his own bed, in the cramped quarters beneath his office. He hadn't died, just awakened suddenly from what must have been a very deep sleep, judging by how disconnected he felt to his surroundings.

Ianto stayed close, watching him carefully in the light of the bedside lamp he'd switched on. "You okay?" he asked when Jack's breathing had slowed.

Jack nodded. He gripped Ianto's arms as an anchor and closed his eyes to recall what had affected him so badly, but the images in his mind were already fading. "I wonder what brought that on," he said, opening his eyes again. "I don't often have bad dreams."

"You don't often sleep this much," Ianto pointed out. "Do you want to talk about it?"

Jack shrugged. "Can't remember much of it, now. I think… I was trapped somewhere. Buried alive." He couldn't picture his surroundings from the dream, but he recalled a texture. "It's like I was sinking in sand."

"Trapped inside an hourglass?" Ianto suggested. "You must really have internalized this thing with the time extinguisher, if your dreams are turning that metaphorical."

Jack gave a humorless laugh. "Or maybe it's just Tuesday. It's not like I don't already have issues with time."

"It's Thursday," Ianto pointed out with a smile. "Maybe your time issues aren't quite what you think." He shifted into a recumbent position and pulled Jack down beside him. "Come here. Try to relax."

Jack settled the length of his body against Ianto's and let himself be folded into his protective embrace. They exchanged a lazy kiss, both too tired to do anything more than enjoy each other's company, and lay their heads close together on one pillow.

Jack was just drifting off to the steady rhythm of Ianto's heartbeat when Ianto spoke again. "It's a pity the time extinguisher can't be used selectively," he murmured.

Jack roused himself and squinted at Ianto. "What do you mean?"

Ianto shrugged as best he could with his arms around Jack. "Only that it would be nice to have a way to pause time for a while. The alarm clock is going to ring in forty-five minutes, but I could quite happily stay like this for a few more hours."

Jack worked one of his arms around Ianto's back and let his fingers explore the divots between his vertebrae. "I could stay like this for a lot longer," he confessed.

Ianto gazed into his eyes from a very close vantage. "How long?"

Jack tried to ignore the old, familiar ache in his chest. "Longer than we have." A change in Ianto's expression warned Jack he'd turned the conversation too serious, and he frantically tried to backpedal. "I mean, forty-five minutes is barely even one sleep cycle…"

"I love you," Ianto said suddenly.

Jack's eyes widened, speech failing as he stared at Ianto, whose cheeks flushed a little in the dim light. He had always known how Ianto felt about him, just as he assumed Ianto more or less knew how Jack felt, but… but they just didn't _say_ things like that. They'd never made any kind of declarations. Not in words, anyway…

"You don't have to say anything," Ianto added quickly, sensing Jack's inability to respond. "In fact, it's probably best if you don't. I know things are complicated for you. I just… wanted you to know."

Jack didn't speak, but he held Ianto close as though eternity could bleed through his skin and freeze this moment in time.

* * *

The next morning was far less awkward than the previous one, as their coworkers had apparently adapted quickly to Jack and Ianto's renewed sleeping arrangements. They didn't seem at all surprised to find Ianto in the Hub early, wearing a slightly-too-large blue shirt and the same tie he'd sported on Wednesday.

"How's the search going?" Mickey asked as he took his morning coffee from the tray Ianto had carried into the briefing room. "Any luck finding a supercomputer or whatever?"

Jack shook his head, the futility of the previous day's efforts returning to weigh him down. "Nobody seems to have a super-intelligent logic system they can spare—at least, not one that's as complex as what we need. I'm open to suggestions, if anyone has had any brainstorms overnight."

The Doctor kicked one worn canvas trainer up on the conference table. "I could take the TARDIS and look farther afield, but even if I could find something suitable, there's no guarantee I could get it here by tomorrow, given the interference the rift has on the local time stream. There's just as good a chance the TARDIS would be knocked into next week. Or a decade from now."

"By which time half of Cardiff could have been pulled into a time bubble," Gwen sighed.

Jamiya glanced over at Ianto. "I assume we've already searched the archives for any kind of alien tech we could use?"

Ianto nodded. "Both here, and at Torchwood Two. Archie thought he might have an android in hibernation, but when he pulled it out of storage, it turned out to be the futuristic equivalent of an inflatable sex doll. Minimal logic processes, not nearly complex enough to house the time extinguisher."

Jack sipped his coffee pensively. "Martha, how's the host looking?"

"Not good. Life support is helping, but in terms of his physical breakdown and diminishing cellular regeneration rate, he's already aged about forty years since he was brought in. At some point his organs will just fail. Probably before the end of the day." She chewed her lip. "It's starting to sound like we're going to have to find something organic to transfer the time extinguisher into, after all. I don't like the idea of putting it inside a person, but…"

"None of us do," Jack said firmly. "And we're not going to, as long as there's the slightest chance we might be able to find another option."

Martha glanced at her watch. "Well, given a constant rate of decline, we've got six to eight hours to find a solution. After that, I can't make any predictions of what will happen."

"We shouldn't leave it that long," the Doctor warned. "I mean, eleventh-hour saves are practically my specialty, but even I wouldn't leave it that long."

Gwen's mobile rang just then, and she fished it out of her pocket. "It's Andy," she announced, and accepted the call. "Good morning, Sergeant Davidson."

Jack raised his eyebrows at Ianto. "Sergeant?"

"Got promoted two years ago," Ianto explained in a low voice, so as not to disturb Gwen's call. "It's been good and bad for us. Good, because it's easier now to get the police to cooperate with us. Bad, because Andy has us on speed dial and calls us up for every little thing."

Gwen groaned and placed the mobile's mouthpiece against her shoulder. "Andy says they've got Weevils swarming out like cockroaches along the waterfront."

"In broad daylight?" Mickey frowned. "That's weird. They only do that when there's some sort of major rift disturbance."

"Which suggests they're sensitive to temporal energies," the Doctor pointed out. "It's possible the time extinguisher is leaking more temporal radiation as the host's body shuts down. Perhaps that's what's disturbing them." He frowned. "But that also means that we may have less time than we thought. As it loses the connection to the host, the time extinguisher could very well become unstable."

Jack was grateful for a concrete problem he could tackle. "Right. Ianto and I will go chase down the Weevils. The rest of you, keep searching for a solution to the time extinguisher problem. Build something if you have to. We have a bunch of computers in storage; surely we can put something together to hold it temporarily until we find a better solution."

The Doctor shook his head. "It's going to take more than a few terabytes of binary code to satisfy Gallifreyan technology."

"If you come up with a better solution while I'm gone, feel free to improvise." Jack pushed up from the table, but Ianto didn't move. "Ianto, you coming?"

Ianto hesitated. "Actually… I'd rather not." He rubbed his left shoulder. "I'm feeling that injury a lot more today, and I was hoping Martha could take a look at it for me."

Jack frowned. "I thought you said it wasn't serious."

"I think it may be a bit more serious than I originally thought. Probably shouldn't be wrestling Weevils until it heals, in any case."

"All right. But I still need a volunteer to help me corral the Weevils." He looked around the table. Gwen's hand immediately shot into the air, but Jack reproached her with a look. "Absolutely not. Mickey, you're with me."

Mickey glanced up in surprise. "I thought you wanted me to try to build some kind of system for the time extinguisher?"

"Ianto can start pulling things out of storage after Martha patches him up. We'll try to wrap up the Weevils quickly, and you can do the rest when we get back."

"Be careful," Jamiya called.

Just before he left the room, Jack saw Ianto exchange a meaningful look with Martha. For an instant it seemed as though the Doctor wanted to say something, but then he sat back, frowning deeply. Jack hesitated.

"Come on, Jack," Mickey called from the corridor ahead. "Those Weevils aren't going to throw themselves back into the sewer, and we're only six hours from the end of the world."

Jack followed him, trying to shake the nagging feeling that he'd missed something vital.


	30. Chapter 30

Ianto was staring into space at his desk when something warm bumped against his shoulder. He turned to find a mug beside him, the string of a tea bag dangling over the rim. He followed the attached arm to find Gwen standing just behind his chair. She smiled warmly. "I didn't think you'd want coffee this late at night. We've all got to _try _to get some sleep, when we can."

"Thanks." He accepted the mug and held it, warming his hands. "I'm not sure caffeine has any effect on me any more, though. I've been living on nothing else for the past few weeks."

"We've always lived on it. The last couple of weeks, we've practically been taking it intravenously." Gwen sighed and dragged a chair over next to his. "How are you holding up?"

Ianto gave a humorless chuckle. "Is that a trick question?"

"I mean since we closed the rift portals. I know you weren't happy about it."

Ianto shrugged. "It's not like we had a choice, really. As much as we talk about preparing ourselves for the future, Torchwood is really positioned _here_ to protect Cardiff from the dangers of the rift. There was a real and present danger, and we eliminated it." He sipped the tea. It was weaker than he liked, but Gwen was right; he probably didn't need to load up on caffeine right before he went home to sleep. Or try to. Even exhausted as he was, his nights hadn't been very restful, of late.

"I know. But I know it's harder for you. I mean, you and Jack…" She finished that thought with an expressive shrug. "I know you'd do anything you could to get him back. You were even willing to dive through that portal to find him."

Ianto smiled grimly. "You'd think so, wouldn't you."

Gwen cocked her head. "What do you mean?"

Ianto stared meditatively into his tea. "I was just thinking about that time Jack and Tosh were trapped in the past. In the old dance hall, remember?" Gwen nodded. "Owen wanted to use the rift manipulator to bring them back."

Gwen couldn't suppress a smile. "And you shot him."

"Yes, I did. But my point is, no matter how much I wanted to bring them back then—and I did, more than anything—I still _made _myself abide by Jack's orders, telling myself it was what he would have wanted. And ultimately, I did the same thing this time."

"Because it was the right thing to do."

"Was it, though?" Ianto swiveled his chair to look at her. "Because that time, Owen was right—he _did_ bring them back when he opened the rift, in spite of my efforts to stop him. Maybe if I'd waited a little longer to close the portals…"

"Then every additional victim of those alien facehugger things would weigh on your conscience," Gwen finished. "Mine, too. I don't think we had a choice, Ianto. We did what we had to." She squeezed his arm. "Jack is immortal, and resourceful, and full of surprises. He'll find a way back to us, don't you worry."

Ianto tried to smile, but the effort hurt his cheeks. "I can't help worrying. I think it goes with the territory."

"Fair enough." Gwen chuckled. "I mean, I worry if Rhys has to go out to London overnight on a delivery."

"And that's not even off this island," Ianto pointed out. "Imagine how you'd feel if the man you loved were lost on another planet."

Gwen's round eyes stretched to their full circumference, and she stared openly at Ianto, who buried his nose in his mug as soon as he realized what he'd let slip. Mercifully, Gwen added nothing to make his unintentional confession more awkward.

They sipped their tea in silence for a moment before Gwen tilted her head at him, curious. "Can I ask you something… personal?"

Ianto cleared his throat, which suddenly felt tight. "Not if it relates in any way to what I just said."

"Not directly," she assured him. "I just wondered… What we were just talking about, when Jack and Tosh were trapped in the past. When that happened, were you and Jack already…?" Her eyebrows arched.

Ianto felt the warmth creep up around his ears, but he nodded. "For a few weeks, then."

"Oh." Gwen sat back.

Ianto eyed her. "Oh? What does 'oh' mean?"

"Nothing, really. I just didn't know how long you'd been together."

Ianto briefly considered trying to explain to her that they hadn't been _together_ then, not really, not until after he'd betrayed Jack again and had nearly been consumed by guilt, and then Jack revived and forgave him but had immediately vanished for months, and then he'd reappeared suddenly and asked Ianto on an incredibly awkward date and… The memories bubbled to the surface, and Ianto clenched his teeth against the emotions they stirred up.

It wasn't any of Gwen's business, really. He didn't need to clarify anything. Let her think what she wanted.

"You really are dedicated, though," she said suddenly. Ianto turned and raised a questioning eyebrow, and she met his eyes. "I hadn't thought of it before, but abiding by Jack's orders, fighting to stop Owen opening the rift to bring them back? That must have been even harder than I realized, since you were already in a relationship with Jack then. I mean, you even shot Owen."

"Well." Ianto smiled faintly. "I mean, Owen deserved it."

Gwen laughed and tilted her head to look at the worn snapshot of Owen and Toshiko she'd affixed to the side of her monitor. "Yes, I imagine he did."

* * *

Jack kicked open the door from the garage and wrestled a half-conscious Weevil into the Hub. Behind him, he heard Mickey swearing, followed by the hiss of a spray can. Over the Weevil's low growls, Mickey's uneven steps clanged on the metal grating. Jack would have turned to see what was happening behind him, but he didn't dare take his eyes off his own feisty captive for that long.

Jamiya started forward when she saw them, then halted as she took in the scene. "What happened? We expected you back hours ago."

"The Weevils were _really _agitated," Jack said. He was breathing hard, and blood dripped steadily from a shallow claw wound at his hairline. He shook a drop away from his eye. "Took us a lot longer than usual to get them underground, and these two wouldn't go quietly." As if on cue, the Weevil beside him lurched against his grip. Jack reeled back from a glancing blow to his cheekbone before delivering a disabling jab to the soft spot at the base of the Weevil's skull. It slumped into submission. "See?" Jack panted. "Not cooperating at all."

Gwen hurried toward the stairs to the vaults. "I'll go ahead and open the doors for you."

"Just stay clear of them when we get them down there," Jack warned.

"I'm not a powder puff, Jack!" Gwen called back.

It took them the better part of ten minutes, another half can of Weevil spray and—against Jack's better judgment—some hands-on assistance from Gwen to contain the aggressive aliens in the vaults, but at least by the time Jack returned to the main level, the bleeding slash on his forehead had slowed to a sluggish ooze. Not that that prevented his mother from fussing over it. "I'm _fine_, really," Jack assured her, dodging as Jamiya tried to blot the wound with an antiseptic pad. "It'll be gone in a few hours. Speaking of which, we have a more urgent…" He leaned over the railing to look into the medical bay to see how the time extinguisher's host was faring, but the autopsy table was empty. "Uh, Martha? What happened to our prehistoric visitor?"

Martha hesitated a moment before answering. "He… died," she said carefully. "A couple of hours ago. There really wasn't much left of him once we removed the time extinguisher, but we collected the remains and put them in the morgue, just in case we need to do any testing in the future."

"He _died?_" Jack bolted down the steps. "Already? What happened to the time extinguisher?"

"Sorted," Ianto called down from above them. He leaned over the rail. "Don't worry, it's safely contained."

Jack whirled to look up at him. "In what?"

"A container of suitable organic complexity." Ianto's gaze shifted to the medic. "Martha, Mickey's limping pretty badly. Apparently that Weevil gave him a nasty kick in the knee. Why don't you patch him up?"

"No, wait, first things first," Jack ordered, turning back to Martha. "_Where _is the time extinguisher?"

Martha bit her lip and looked up at Ianto. "I think I should let Ianto fill you in on the details while I take a look at Mickey. Mick, can you manage the stairs?"

"Yeah." Mickey leaned heavily on the wall as he passed by Jack. "Can we _please_ be done for the day after this? I'm all in."

Jack's head swam a little. "Why is everyone suddenly acting like nothing is wrong? Are we not still facing a potentially catastrophic event that could tear open the rift and/or suck Cardiff into a temporal black hole?"

"Nope," Ianto said. "The time extinguisher is stable. Even the Doctor checked it and says it should be safe for a good long while. Come into the office and I'll explain everything. Mickey, you can go home once Martha's finished with you. We can manage without you for the rest of the evening. Martha, why don't you drive him? From the way he's limping, he probably shouldn't use that leg."

Jack froze on the stairs, staring up at Ianto. "Don't you think you'd better check with me first?" he asked quietly. "Or are you taking charge of Torchwood again?"

"Let him go, Jack," Ianto advised in the same low tone. "Let them all go. We have some talking to do, and however it comes out, I doubt you'll want an audience."


	31. Chapter 31

"All right." Jack rounded on Ianto once they were ensconced in his office. "I've sent everyone else home, as you requested. Now will you please tell me what the _hell _is going on? Where's the time extinguisher?"

"Jack, you can relax. There's no emergency."

"I'll relax when I know what happened to a potentially world-ending Gallifreyan time-altering artifact!" Jack snapped. He heard the echo of his own angry voice and consciously took several deep breaths to expel his frustration. "Just… tell me what happened."

Ianto tucked his hands in his pockets. Jack found his apparent calm infuriating. "After you left this morning, Martha spent the day monitoring the host's body."

"After she checked out your shoulder, you mean?"

Ianto blinked. "Yes. Well. We'll get to that later."

Jack didn't like the sound of that, but Ianto's potential soft tissue injury was hardly the most pressing issue. "Go on."

"We already knew the host body wasn't going to last the day. Around lunchtime, his condition started deteriorating rapidly. The time extinguisher was disengaging from his body, and the Doctor said if we left it too long, it could become too unstable to reseat in another system. We hadn't had a chance to assemble any sort of containment unit—even if we had the resources to make something that could properly house the device, which we hadn't—so our options were very limited."

"Ianto," Jack growled, "cut to the chase."

"We found a volunteer."

Jack frowned. "A volunteer?"

"A human volunteer."

"You mean… what we talked about last night? Putting it in a terminal patient?"

"Yes." Ianto shrugged. "Well. Sort of."

"Ianto—"

"Yes. We put it in someone who was going to die." He shifted to lean back against Jack's desk. "Just not someone who was going to die… immediately."

Jack stared at him for a moment, utter shock stealing his power of speech. "You did _what?_" he spluttered when he found his voice again.

"Don't worry. He knew what he was signing on for."

"He can't possibly know!" Jack whirled to pace across his office, aimless steps just to burn energy. "Ianto, _nobody_ knows what it's like. Nobody _should_ know. We have to get it out of him, before it's too late."

Ianto crossed his arms, watching Jack's long strides devour the floor. "And exactly where do you plan on putting the time extinguisher when you do?"

"I don't know! But the longer a person is exposed to it, the worse the effect will be when it's taken out. You saw what happened to that prehistoric man." Jack scrubbed his palms over his face. "You can't _stop_ someone like that. You can't take time away from them, and then just switch it back on at some point. The shock of all that time returning at once would be devastating."

"And what if you never switch it back on?"

Jack turned to gape at him in renewed horror. "No. Not an option. I told you I wouldn't condemn anyone to my kind of existence, and I mean it."

"Even if it means saving the world?"

Jack froze. "What do you mean?"

Ianto reached up to loosen his necktie. "The time extinguisher was apparently damaged when Rasdall pulled it out of its previous host and jammed it back in again. That's probably why it was leaking so much temporal radiation, and aggravated the Weevils. The Doctor examined it, and thinks it's on a countdown to failure."

"And what happens when it fails?"

Ianto shrugged. "It just stops working, near as he can tell. Runs itself down like a dying battery. But that means the current host's body won't truly be frozen in time—at least, not completely. He'll gradually age, just at a considerably reduced rate."

Jack didn't let himself feel relieved—not yet. "How reduced?"

"Over a few thousand years." Ianto smiled faintly. "Which, considering the device was developed to work on a scale of geologic ages, _is _a pretty fast breakdown."

Jack shook his head. "A few thousand years is untenable. That's even longer than _I__'ve_ lived. I still can't permit it to happen."

"Problem is," Ianto went on, "the damage makes the time extinguisher even more prone to instability. For every second that it's not directly connected to a host, there's a percentage chance of localized time implosion. The Doctor's terms, not mine. I don't actually know what happens if time implodes, but I gather it's not a desirable outcome…"

"You're saying we can't take it out of whoever it's implanted in right now."

"I'm saying we can, but there's a definite risk if we do. And we certainly wouldn't want to unless we have a failure-proof permanent storage solution on hand to contain it _immediately_ upon removal."

"And we haven't been able to come up with any kind of permanent storage solution so far." Jack groaned and put his head in his hands. "Where is this… this volunteer now?"

"Still in the Hub."

"I need to talk to him." Jack paced another turn of his office. "I need to let him know the consequences, explain what he's potentially facing…"

"He knows."

"I told you, he can't possibly—"

"_He knows_, Jack."

Jack spun toward Ianto, but the argument he was preparing faded into confusion when he saw Ianto unbuttoning his shirt. "What are you…"

Ianto pulled his collar open. Jack stared for a few seconds at the strange green aura just beneath Ianto's collarbone before he fully registered what he was seeing.

"No," breathed Jack. "No. No, please. No."

"It was my choice, Jack," Ianto said carefully. "I made the decision."

"No. You can't—" Jack's voice broke, his throat constricting with tears. "You _can__'t_. You can't know what it's really like."

"I think I've gotten a pretty accurate impression from you." Ianto pushed off the desk and approached him. Jack was frozen in place, unable to retreat. "And I didn't come to this decision lightly. I've been thinking about it ever since we learned what the time extinguisher was."

"You shouldn't have sacrificed yourself!"

"Someone had to, and I was the best candidate. And more than that… I wanted to."

"But _why?_" Jack seized his shoulders. "You know what I've gone through. You _know_ it's a living hell! Why would you condemn yourself to that kind of existence?"

"Because I love you," Ianto said, meeting Jack's gaze evenly. He let Jack absorb those words for a few seconds before continuing. "And because I know you love me, even if you can't say it. And I understand why you don't—you're holding back, trying to protect yourself, because you lose everyone you love. Because in the grand span of time, you're _alone_." He stepped closer. "But the time extinguisher gave me the power to end all that. You don't have to be afraid of losing me, Jack. You don't have to be alone. I'll stay with you for as long as this lasts." He brushed the faint slash of light embedded in his shoulder.

Jack's throat burned. "It isn't that easy," he choked out. "You may think you're prepared, but the reality is…" He couldn't form the words, and instead he cradled Ianto's cheek in his palm. "I don't want that for you," he whispered. "I don't want you to suffer like I have."

"You've suffered because you've been facing everything on your own all this time." Ianto covered Jack's hand with his own. "You said yourself that you didn't want to lose me. I don't want you to lose me, either. If this is what it takes for us to be together—really, truly _together_—then I'm willing to endure whatever hardships may come with it." He leaned into Jack's palm. "I _love _you, Jack. Can't you understand that? If these last five years have made me realize anything, it's that I don't ever want to be parted from you again. I want to spend the rest of my life with you."

"But it's not just one lifetime you're signing on for. A hundred years from now, a _thousand_, there's no going back. If you change your mind…" Jack touched the softly glowing patch of skin. "You'll come to resent me for this."

"I won't," Ianto assured him. "It's my choice, and I'll accept the consequences, for good or ill." He hesitated. "Unless… unless you're saying you lied to me, and you don't actually want me. In which case, please tell me now, while there's still a chance of reversing the process with minimal damage."

Jack stared at him. "You didn't think to ask me that _before_ implanting the time extinguisher in yourself?"

"Oh, I thought of it, but I knew you'd object on principle, and say whatever you thought you had to to stop me." Ianto looked him squarely in the eye. "The reality is that _someone _has to live with this thing inside them for the next few thousand years, but it doesn't have to be me. So if you honestly don't want to be with me, if you don't love me, if everything you said before was a lie, then tell me now, and we'll find someone else to sacrifice."

"I…" Jack knew he should say exactly that. He should tell Ianto he was mistaking Jack's casual affection for something more, and urge him to remove the time extinguisher while he still could. But doing so would end whatever was between them, and Jack wasn't sure he could bear that. Not now. "I'd be lying if I did," he said at last.

"You're sure?" The corners of Ianto's lips twitched upward. "Last chance to pretend you don't care about me."

Jack shook his head, defeated. "Even if I tried, it wouldn't fool either of us. Are you sure you won't regret this?"

"You know me well enough to know that I wouldn't have gone through with it if I hadn't been absolutely certain."

Jack knew that much was true. The rest of what Ianto had promised was gradually beginning to sink in. "And you'll stay with me?"

Ianto's arms found their way about his waist. "I'm yours, Jack. For as long as you'll have me."

"Forever," Jack breathed. "Stay with me forever." His new reality snapped into alignment around him: _Ianto wouldn__'t leave him_. Ianto would be with him, love him, care for him, hold him, comfort him, be his family and lover and friend. Jack wouldn't have to face eternity alone, losing one lover after another, being rejected for what he was, hiding his feelings from people who couldn't possibly understand what he had suffered. Ianto would be his companion through all of it. Ianto would be _his_. Hot tears flooded Jack's eyes.

"I love you," Jack said suddenly. The barriers he'd set for himself washed away in the tide of relief that he was no longer alone, and it was liberating to admit aloud what he had tried to deny for so long. "_I love you._"

A look of joy illuminated Ianto's face, and he pulled Jack close. "I love you, too," he whispered.

Jack breathed the words again and again as he pressed his lips against Ianto's cheek, his throat, the circle of light beneath his collarbone. Ianto's hand slid up the back of his neck and gently guided Jack's head down to rest on his shoulder.

As Jack's forehead pressed into the curve of Ianto's neck, a ghost of the lingering pain twinged in his temple, but he ignored it. Not even physical discomfort could dim the joy of this moment. Surely life could hold no greater happiness for him than the knowledge that he would spend the centuries loving and being loved, and he would never be alone again.


	32. Chapter 32

"Absolutely not," Ianto said.

John Hart positioned himself in the doorway of Jack's office, scowling. "Look, I've behaved, haven't I? I've done everything you asked. I helped Jamiya track Jack's signal and shut down the portals. I've even captured Weevils and wood striders and Fendomorths for you. What more do I have to do to get this bloody thing off my leg?"

"Be someone other than who you are," Ianto snapped, shoving past him. "I don't trust you, and frankly, I don't think you would have stuck around this long if you hadn't been under threat of dismemberment. The only reason you're at liberty at all is because we've had bigger and more immediate crises to deal with."

Hart trailed him through the center of the Hub. "I'm deeply wounded, Eye Candy."

Ianto whirled and jabbed a finger into Hart's chest. "Say it again, and you go straight back into the vaults."

Hart held up his hands in surrender. "Fine. _Mr. Jones_. But it's been _weeks _now, and this bloody thing chafes something awful. My boot is starting to wear through at the ankle."

"Easy solution to that," Ianto said, continuing on toward the kitchenette. "Gwen! Got a minute?"

"I will shortly," Gwen called over from her desk. "What do you need?"

Ianto began filling the coffee basket with a robust, highly-caffeinated blend he'd purchased the previous day. "I'm going to take Officer Ungulate down to the vaults and switch the temporal anchor to his other ankle. I need you there to shoot him if he tries anything."

"Ooh, sounds fun!" Gwen said. "I'll be right there."

"Ungulate?" Hart echoed in disbelief. "What, were the shops sold out of _clever_ insults?"

"Hart?" Gwen prompted. "Ungulate? Get it? Because a hart is a kind of—"

"Oh, I got it," Hart groused. "It just wasn't _good._"

"You don't exactly inspire me to bring out my best work." Ianto arched his eyebrows. "Though if you'd prefer I just leave your ankle bracelet off entirely, that can be arranged."

Hart brightened. "Really?"

"Belay that, Gwen. I'm just going to lock him in the vaults indefinitely. Remind me to feed him once every week or so."

"Aww," Gwen moped theatrically. "Does that mean I _don__'t _get to shoot him?"

Hart glared at her. "Is there a reason everyone is so keen on shooting me all of a sudden?"

"Well, now, this is just a theory," Gwen said as she came to lean over the railing, "but it just _might_ have something to do with the fact that I had to go across town to the police station and bail you out first thing this morning. Trespassing and public indecency, of all things! What are you, twelve?"

Hart scowled. "Hey, it was _not _my fault. That bird with the long, sexy legs led me on. How was I supposed to know she didn't actually want to hook up?"

"That bird with the long legs was an _ostrich_, you wanker. What were you even _doing _at the Cardiff Zoo?"

Jamiya, who had been observing their exchange with a look of tired resignation, chose this juncture to step in. "Look, I think we're all a bit unsettled today. Before anyone shoots anyone else, why don't we all get out of the Hub for a while? I want to take a final set of readings to make sure the portals are staying closed before you lift that evacuation order. John can help me."

"But he can't drive," Ianto pointed out.

"I can so," Hart grumbled. "You just won't _let _me."

Gwen sighed and pushed herself away from the rail. "I'll drive. I'm not accomplishing much here, anyway. And for the record," she said, turning back to Hart, "I really am looking for an excuse to shoot you. So please, by all means, do try something on our little outing."

"Did you say _try something on?_" Hart waggled his eyebrows.

Ianto was trying to decide whether it would be more satisfying to shoot Hart or to strangle him slowly when he heard the trill of his mobile. He retrieved the device from his pocket and stabbed the answer button without looking. "Yes?" he snapped

"Mr. Jones?" a woman's voice at the other end of the line said, almost tentatively.

"Yes. What is it?"

"This is Helen Abernathy, Mr. Jones. From the Flat Holm facility?"

Ianto stepped away from the rest of the group and let his impatience drain away. "Right, hello. How are things?"

Helen sighed. "Not good for that patient you brought in, I'm afraid. I think he's nearing the end. I wanted to let you know, since you… well. You asked to be notified."

Ianto's stomach coiled into an unforgiving knot. "I'll be there as soon as I can."

* * *

Ianto watched through the observation window as a hazard-suited nurse administered a series of eleventh-hour injections to the facehugger victim, but the monotonous blips of the monitoring equipment continued to decline gradually. The man's pulse rate and blood oxygen levels had been falling steadily all day, Helen had informed Ianto when he arrived. The display now flashed at nine beats per minute. Barely alive.

The nurse finally shook his head at the window and stepped through to the decontamination chamber. Beside Ianto, Helen sighed. "We've done all we can for him."

Ianto felt emotion welling up within him, but he forced it back down. He couldn't cry and rage and vent his anger at the futility of all things; he had to maintain a professional appearance, had to hold things together until Jack returned and could lift the burden of responsibility from his shoulders. "Thank you," he said, his voice flat and detached even to his own ears. "I know he's had the best care possible here."

Helen gave him a sympathetic look. "It's all right if you'd like to sit with him," she said quietly. "It won't make any difference to our procedure."

Ianto nodded, not trusting himself to speak. He mechanically donned a protective suit and took his place beside the patient, as he had every week since Jack had vanished. "I'm sorry," he whispered, cradling the man's hand. The skin was still raw with unhealed blisters, and his limbs looked even thinner and more dessicated than they had been at Ianto's last visit. "I wish I could help you. All I can do is stay with you so you're not alone at the end."

He sat in silence for a while. The EKG dropped to eight beats per minute, then seven. Ianto recalled the alarms that had wailed when his father had gone into cardiac arrest, but these systems had long since been muted. This patient had been dying since before Ianto had brought him here. Since before Jack had found him in the lot behind Morrie's. They had just been waiting, all along, knowing the inevitable outcome.

"It's funny," Ianto murmured. "I've seen so much death. I've lost people I loved. Dad, Mum, Lisa, Jack… Jack, so many times. So many horrible ways. And it _never_ gets easier. Even when I know he'll come right back, it hurts so much to watch him die. And now, you… I don't even know who you are, or where you're from, or anything at all about you, really. But I wanted so badly to save you. Even now, as much as you've suffered, I wish you could keep on fighting a little while longer." The display dropped to six beats per minute, the irregular blips separated by unsettling stretches of quiet. "I know you're running out of time. I just… I hope you can hear me, and that you know that you matter to someone."

Five beats per minute.

"That's what all of us want, isn't it? Not to be alone. To be cared for. To be remembered. Whoever you are, I hope I've done that for you, a little bit. I hope you know that you're not alone. That I'm here with you."

Flatline.

"I'm sorry," Ianto whispered again.

When he exited the decontamination room, Helen was waiting for him. She'd held back the other staff until Ianto had left, for which he was grateful. "Are you all right?" she asked quietly, once the other nurses had moved into the sealed room to take care of the body.

Ianto nodded, though he felt utterly wrung out. "Just part of the job," he said bitterly. "As I'm sure you know better than anyone."

"I do. Doesn't make it any easier, though."

Ianto shied away from the echo of his confession to the dying patient. _Business. Focus on the work._ "That thing on his face is still alive, isn't it? It will need to be contained. I don't have any staff available right now to study it, so we should—"

A shrill scream interrupted him. Ianto bolted back through the airlock into the clean room, not bothering with protective gear. His pistol was in his hand even before he'd fully taken in the scene: The two nurses who had come to retrieve the corpse were flattened against the far wall, faces contorted in terror behind their protective visors. On the table where the human victim had been now lay a crumbled husk that Ianto only identified as the alien by one spindly leg that still stuck up from the pile of dessicated tissue.

The patient was nowhere to be seen.

"What happened?" Ianto demanded. "Where is the body?"

One of the nurses raised a shaky arm to point across the room. Ianto spun, automatically raising his pistol, to find an emaciated figure in a paper gown crouching in the farthest corner. His head was down, blistered hands scrabbling feebly at his face, so all that was visible was his thin crop of brittle-blond hair. Before Ianto could speak to him, the man let out a pitiful moan and clutched at his head, ducking his face even lower behind the protective shield of his arms.

"Get back into the decon area," Ianto snapped over his shoulder. "Seal off this room." The nurses wasted no time complying, and only after he heard the hiss of the airlock did Ianto move warily toward the man in the corner, keeping his firearm at low-ready. "Sir, can you hear me? Can you understand what I'm saying?" The patient froze and seemed to be listening, and the muzzle of Ianto's pistol notched slightly higher. "No sudden movements, please. All right? Now, I need you to speak to me, so I know how to help you. Can you tell me who you are?" He waited a few seconds. The patient's head swiveled minutely from side to side, but he did not answer. "Sir, can you understand me? Are you all right?"

Slowly, the patient raised his head.

Ianto's breath caught in his throat, and his hands went cold as shock drained the blood from them. "Dear _God_."


	33. Chapter 33

_Jack._

Jack, floating in the pleasant haze between oblivion and awareness, resisted responding.

"Jack?"

Jack blinked, the world gradually coming into focus around him. Golden sunlight slanted across his field of vision. He was in bed. He was in _a _bed, but not his own.

"Good morning." There was a pause before the words were followed by a gentle nudge to the back of his shoulder. "Hey. You awake?"

Jack rolled over to find Ianto, propped up on one elbow, watching him with amusement. "Yeah, I'm awake. I think." He rubbed his eyes, but the haze remained. Why was he so tired?

Ianto chuckled. "I must have really worn you out last night. You never sleep later than I do."

"I… last night?" Even forming the words took an unreasonable amount of effort. Jack blinked again, trying to focus.

"Don't tell me you've forgotten already." Ianto slid a hand over Jack's bare chest and kissed him. The fringes of his beard tickled Jack's lips. "I should hope a night like that would be more memorable. What's that saying that's always being bandied about—the first night of the rest of our lives?" He grinned. "Our very, very long lives."

"I'm… starting to remember," Jack murmured, his voice rough with sleep. Ianto had insisted they return to his flat, rather than spend yet another night sharing the cramped bed in Jack's quarters. The details after that eluded him, but Jack recalled now what they had been celebrating. He ran a finger over the barely-visible spot of light on Ianto's chest. "Does it hurt?"

"Tingles a little. I hardly notice it."

A wave of guilt dragged Jack away from the edge of happiness. He might not remember exactly what had happened last night, but he clearly recalled what had Ianto given up for him. Friends. Family. Mortality. A normal life. "You sure it's worth it?"

"I'm sure _you__'re_ worth it." Ianto stroked his face gently. "And you can stop asking that, now. I'd hoped I'd laid those fears to rest last night. Don't you remember what I told you?"

Half-formed memories bobbed to the surface of Jack's mind: Ianto's voice, whispering promises in the dark. He couldn't really remember what had been said, but Ianto clearly did—and it seemed to have been something important. Jack hoped this memory lapse didn't come back to haunt him the way missed birthdays and anniversaries always seemed to. "I could do with hearing it again," he tried, adding a cheeky grin to increase the chances of Ianto indulging him.

Ianto rolled his eyes. "We have plenty of time for an encore performance. Just wait until tomorrow night." He paused, and some part of Jack's brain recognized that he was waiting for Jack to suggest they not wait so long, but Jack was floundering too deep in the fog of his mind to be able to put that thought into a coherent sentence, much less be able to act on it.

That wasn't like him at all. Was it?

After a moment of silence, Ianto frowned and touched Jack's forehead. "Hey, you okay? You're awfully quiet."

Jack squeezed his eyes shut for a few seconds, wishing he could put his thoughts in some kind of order. "Dunno. Just… tired, I guess."

"That's not normal for you, not after you've slept the night through." Ianto's expression turned thoughtful, then alarmed. "You don't think… Could it be some sort of adverse reaction?"

Jack blinked at him. "What?"

"I mean, between this," he tapped the place where the time extinguisher was implanted, "and whatever causes your immortality. The Doctor said the two modes weren't compatible, like opposite magnetic poles…"

Jack rocked his head from side to side in a slow negative. "If time were going to implode, or anything, I don't think it would wait until the morning after to do it. It's not like paradoxes and things have to reach critical mass before happening. They just… boom." That was the image in his mind, but not the word he'd meant to use. "They… happen, I mean."

Ianto didn't look convinced. "Maybe we should ask the Doctor, just to be sure."

Jack let his eyes fall closed again. "You planning on giving me up if he says it's a problem?"

"Not for the world." Ianto leaned down to kiss the point of his shoulder. "But it _would_ mean we'd need to find some way to mitigate the temporal fields surrounding our respective…"

Ianto continued talking, complex words pouring from his lips, but Jack soon lost the meaning of whatever he was saying. His mind drifted, unable to focus on any one point. The dull ache that had persisted in his temple for days formed an insidious undertow that dragged all his energy away. He was just so _tired_.

_…keep on fighting…_

Wait, what was Ianto saying? Jack groped after the words, belatedly trying to follow the thread of the single-sided conversation, but the previous topic was soon replaced by Ianto's repetition of a single word. One that had significance to him…

_Jack_.

"Jack?" Ianto called again.

The word finally slammed through the fog in his brain, and Jack blinked Ianto's face into focus. More or less. "Here."

"Were you listening to me at all?"

"Sorry. Think I drifted off again."

"Evidently." There was a deep crease between Ianto's brows. "Bored with me already, are you?"

"Never." Jack roused himself with considerable effort. "Just… like you said, you wore me out. I'm awake now, really."

"So you say." Ianto shook his head fondly. "And here I thought you had more stamina than me."

"Been a busy week," Jack murmured. "Time travel, Weevil wrestling, saving the world…"

"The usual, in other words."

"…not to mention the calisthenics you've put me through."

"In that regard, _I_ should be the one out of practice. It's been five years since I had a regular workout partner."

"Which means you're better rested. I haven't had a break."

"I've never known you to need one. Or want one, for that matter." Ianto chuckled. "But I can see we're going to have to work on our training regimen. I can't have you falling asleep on me every time. Fortunately," he gestured to the room they were in, "I have a fully-equipped workout facility. New mattress, even." He patted the bed.

Jack's eyes slid beyond Ianto's face to the rest of the bedroom, taking notice of their surroundings for the first time. "This is your place? I don't recognize it."

Ianto's eyebrows arched. "You _are _still half asleep, aren't you? Though I suppose it was pretty dark when we came in last night, and we were a bit… distracted." His fingers strayed across Jack's torso again. "I sold the house and moved to this flat about six months ago. Closer to work; saved me nearly thirty minutes a day on the commute. It might be a bit small for the two of us, but we have plenty of time to work out our living arrangements." He smiled, a bit dreamily. "We have _so much_ time, Jack."

_…running out of time…_

Jack's head tipped toward Ianto's shoulder, drawing him back toward oblivion, but he jerked away from the void in his head. "Shoulder," he mumbled.

"What was that?"

"How's shoulder?" Jack had to concentrate very hard to put words in the proper order, and even then, the longer ones eluded him entirely. "You hurt your shoulder. You said, yesterday. It still hurt."

"Just a minor strain, as I said. It's better now."

"Did Martha look?"

"No, I only said that to have an excuse to stay in the Hub yesterday. I had a feeling things were going to go… well. The way they did." Ianto smiled down at him. "It's thoughtful of you to ask, though. Thank you."

Jack issued a faint _hmph_. "Liar."

"Only in a good cause." Ianto tapped the light in his chest. "Had to save the world."

"Don't do it again."

"Which—saving the world, or lying about it?"

Jack glared.

Ianto's smile softened. "All right. I won't lie to you again."

"Promise."

"I will, if you'll do the same. If we're going to be stuck together for the next few millennia, we should at least be completely honest with each other, no matter what we have to tell the rest of the world."

"Deal."

"I promise, then." Ianto kissed Jack's forehead. "Now that that's settled, would you like some breakfast?"

Jack wasn't aware of being hungry, but there was something he usually wanted in the morning… "Coffee?"

"I can do that, too." Ianto rolled upright and pulled on a pair of pajama bottoms. "Why don't you grab a shower first? It'll help you wake up."

Jack tried to get to his feet, but his limbs felt sluggish and uncoordinated. "I… what's…"

Ianto was standing in the doorway, looking back at him. "Or maybe you should go back to sleep. If you don't feel well, you can just rest. You needn't force yourself."

Jack shook his head, but the movement set off the pounding in his temple. "My head… something's wrong…" The pain intensified suddenly, and he cried out.

Ianto was beside him in a second. "Here, lean on me." He tucked Jack's head beneath his chin and held him close. "It'll be all right, Jack. Close your eyes. Just stay with me."

"Stay…" Jack echoed. That's right; Ianto was going to stay with him. Forever.

"Yes," Ianto murmured. "Forever. I'll always be with you, Jack. I'll never leave you. Just rest now."

Ianto's embrace felt warm and safe and permanent. "I love you," Jack mumbled into his shoulder.

_You__'re not alone_, Ianto whispered.

Jack twisted to gaze up at him. "I know."

Ianto's brow furrowed. "Know what?"

"You said…" Jack hesitated. He _had _heard Ianto's voice, hadn't he?

Ianto pressed a hand against Jack's forehead. His palm was cool and soothing, and almost muted the pain lancing through Jack's skull. "Jack, you should lie down again. Rest. Go to sleep."

Jack shook his head weakly. "Feels like if I go back to sleep, I won't wake up."

_…I'm here with you…_ Ianto's words seemed to fade in and out.

"What?" Jack squinted at him, but his vision was growing ever hazier.

"Don't fight it," Ianto said. "Just close your eyes. Sleep now."

He felt the pressure of Ianto's hands gripping one of his own. _I__'m sorry_, he heard Ianto whisper.

Jack must have closed his eyes then, for the darkness was sudden and complete.


	34. Chapter 34

"Dear _God_."

The sharp words, uttered in a familiar Welsh accent, penetrated the fog in Jack's mind more clearly than all the sounds that had come before. He raised his head, tried to focus on his surroundings, but nothing made sense as he looked around the room. The space was harsh and sterile, with medical monitors framing a utilitarian cot beneath too-bright lights that haloed the edges of his vision. _A hospital?_ His memory was jumbled and clouded with pain, but he thought he recalled blacking out in Ianto's arms. Had he collapsed? Had Ianto brought him here? "Ianto?" he mumbled. His tongue felt thick, his voice ragged and parched. He was _certain_ he'd heard Ianto's voice just now, but where was he? "Where…? How did I get here?"

"Exactly what I was about to ask you." Jack oriented on the sound, and _there_ he was—Ianto was standing on the far side of the room, his posture rigid and a pistol in his hand. Why was he armed, if they were in a hospital? What was going on? Where _were _they?

After staring for a moment longer, Ianto tucked the semi-automatic into a holster at the small of his back and slowly approached Jack. He seemed pale and shaken, and oddly, he'd shaved since the last time Jack saw him.

An echo of the dizzying pain flashed through Jack's head again, and he pressed his hand to his right temple. "What happened to me?"

Ianto crouched a short distance away, but didn't answer. His eyes were wide with… was that _fear_? "Tell me who you are."

"What?"

"Identify yourself."

Jack squinted at Ianto for a few seconds, until the pain began to ebb. "Captain Jack Harkness. And you're Ianto Jones." He hesitated. "Aren't you?"

"Yes. What are the first six digits of your authorization code?"

Jack tipped his head back against the wall. It hurt. _Everything_ hurt. "Four seven four three one seven."

"That's right." As Ianto's familiar blue eyes searched Jack's face, the harsh lines surrounding them softened. "It really is you, isn't it?"

"Of course it's me." Jack tried to push himself into a more upright position, but his weak arms buckled beneath him. Ianto reached forward to steady him, and Jack cried out in pain.

Ianto jerked back. "Sorry! I'm sorry, I forgot about the burns."

Jack looked down at his arms, which emerged raw and blistered from the sleeves of a paper hospital gown. _Just like they were when the Doctor found me last week_. But those wounds had healed days ago. What had happened to him since that morning—at least, the last morning he remembered—in Ianto's flat? He looked around the room, seeking anything that would help fill in the gaps in his understanding. "Where's the Doctor?"

Ianto pointed toward the room's door, which appeared to have an air-tight seal around it. "I sent all the nurses out. Do you want me to call someone?"

"No, the Doctor. _The _Doctor. Where is he?"

"The Doctor?" Ianto's brow furrowed. "Jack, we haven't heard from the Doctor in months, not since the thing with the Daleks. Have you seen him?"

"Of course I've seen him. He's the one who brought me back to Cardiff, remember? How could you forget? He even helped you implant the…" Jack trailed off as Ianto's look of consternation deepened.

Jack squinted hard at Ianto. Facial hair aside, this was definitely _not_ the same man who had been holding him when he blacked out. This Ianto was decidedly younger, with fewer lines about his eyes and a few more inches at his waist. Jack's deeply-ingrained Time Agent training began sending up warning flares. His own memory couldn't provide the dots to connect, and there were too many gaps in continuity for him to take anything at face value. If this wasn't the Ianto he knew and trusted, there was a chance the whole scenario in which he found himself could be some kind of enemy scheme. This Ianto could be a ringer, a spy wearing a Shimmer, or even a hard light projection—any one of which could be engineered to gain Jack's confidence while he was disoriented. The pain Jack was feeling seemed real enough; had he been interrogated? Tortured? That would explain the new wounds on his body…

But that didn't exactly add up, either. If all of this were some kind of elaborate ruse, why put a gun in Ianto's hand? Why make him look so frightened? Why ask for only six digits of Jack's authorization code, rather than the full number?

Before he jumped to any outlandish conclusions, he should consider that there might be another, simpler explanation for this Ianto's youthful features. "Wait," Jack murmured, his brain still churning sluggishly. At last he landed on the most obvious possibility. "What year is it?"

"It's 2009. The twenty-third of July, if it matters."

A hollow pit formed behind Jack's navel. "It's not 2014?"

For answer, Ianto held out his mobile phone. The lock screen clearly displayed the date. "Were you in 2014 before you came back through the rift?"

"Back through the rift?" Jack slumped back against the wall. "Is that how I got here?" But that made no sense at all; last he knew, he'd been in Ianto's bedroom. If he had fallen through the rift, why wasn't his Ianto here with him? For that matter, Jack still didn't know where the hell _here _was.

"As far as we know," Ianto-not-Ianto answered. "What do you remember? Where were you before this?"

"I was in yo—" He caught himself. "—a flat in Cardiff. But I don't remember coming here."

"You were unconscious when we found you."

"Where was that?"

Ianto, apparently tired of crouching, rocked back so he was sitting on the floor. "Do you remember the facehuggers?"

Jack nodded, concentrating hard. It had only been a little over a week, hadn't it? Why was he having trouble remembering? "I… got chased into the rift by one. There were even more on the other side."

"You remember finding the two bodies behind Morrie's?"

"Yeah. One was dead. The other still had an alien stuck to his face."

"That second body was _you_, Jack."

Jack frowned. "Couldn't have been."

"Look at yourself." Ianto indicated Jack's blistered skin. "You remember the condition he was in, don't you?"

"But I touched that body," Jack insisted. "If it had been me, two versions of me making contact would have triggered a major paradox."

Ianto pointed to the table behind him, where the jointed leg of one of the alien crustaceans was still visible. "We couldn't get the facehugger off, so I brought that body here, to Flat Holm, for monitoring. After several weeks, the victim finally died. Only not ten minutes later, he suddenly revived, which scared the hell out of a couple of nurses, and must have shocked the creature, or something, because now it's dead and you're alive." The strain was audible in his voice. "I was _here_, Jack. I saw you die."

It was a fantastic story, but Ianto was right about his wounds; they _did_ resemble the ones the mysterious body had borne. Jack glanced at his wrist, naked without the vortex manipulator he usually wore. He knew he'd been wearing it when they found the bodies. "Huh. My wrist strap must have canceled out the Blinovitch Limitation Effect." He flashed a weak grin. "That opens up a whole new realm of possibilities."

Ianto rolled his eyes, which more than anything else convinced Jack that this was _real_, that this was the authentic Ianto Jones and not some sinister plot or simulation. Jack started to reach for him, to reassure him and drive the concern in his eyes away with a kiss, but then—

_He__'s not _my _Ianto_.

The realization struck him like a physical blow. This wasn't the time the Doctor hadn't brought him back to. _His _Ianto—the one who loved him, who had made such a great sacrifice to keep Jack from being alone—was still five years in the future.

Or _was_ he? Everyone in 2014 had agreed that Jack had been missing since the facehugger incident, which meant he couldn't possibly have awakened in 2009 without triggering a paradox. Had he somehow fallen into an alternate reality? Could the time extinguisher have done something to alter the timelines? Was his Ianto searching for him somewhere, frantic because his Jack had suddenly vanished?

And _this_ Ianto claimed that Jack had fallen back through the rift with an alien attached to his face, which suggested that in this reality, he had never escaped the crashed transport ship in the desert where he'd last seen one of the facehuggers. But Jack distinctly remembered being rescued by the Doctor, arriving in 2014, recovering the time extinguisher, and… _Ianto_. The very fact that his memories remained intact was proof that all of that had happened _somewhere _in his own timeline.

Jack's head began to ache again as he tried to sort it all out. "Ianto," he asked slowly, "who is working for Torchwood right now?"

"You mean regular staff?" Ianto frowned. "Just you, me and Gwen. Your mother and John Hart have stuck around for the last few weeks, but that was mostly to help us look for you after you went through the rift."

"Not Martha? Or Mickey?"

"Martha went back to London weeks ago. Who's Mickey?"

Jack stared numbly at his hands. "But I remember it," he murmured. "So it happened. But how did I get _here?_"

"Jack? What's wrong?" Ianto gingerly took his shoulders, careful to avoid the worst of the burns. "Hey. Can you hear me?" When he still didn't respond, Ianto shook him gently. "Jack? Are you all right?"

The ramping concern in Ianto's voice brought him back to the present. He couldn't answer questions just now; he wasn't certain what had happened to him, or even what timeline he was in. And somewhere, some_when_, he'd left his Ianto behind, and he didn't have the faintest idea how to get back to him. He didn't know if he _could_, and that bleak possibility cast a heavy shadow over his thoughts.

Jack pasted a grin on his face and hoped this Ianto couldn't see how devastated he was. "'Course I'm all right," he said. "You know I can survive anything."

Silently he added, _because I have no choice_.

* * *

As they approached the Cardiff dock, Ianto shot another glance at Jack from the pilot's seat, but Jack was still staring blankly out at the water. He'd remained quiet and withdrawn since they'd left Flat Holm. Ianto had tried to ask about Jack's experiences on the other side of the rift, but each time, Jack had deflected the questions. The thought that Jack wasn't willing to confide in him distressed Ianto, but he told himself that Jack's reluctance to speak might simply have been fatigue. Whatever effect the alien facehugger had had on his body, it seemed to have drained his healing energy as well as his physical strength. Jack's skin remained raw and tender, and although he seemed to be gradually regenerating some of his lost body mass, it was a much slower process than his usual recovery. Ianto wondered how long it would take for Jack's hair to return to its healthy natural brown instead of the patchy, brittle straw to which it had been bleached. Wherever Jack had been all this time, the sun had not been kind to him.

_All this time_. It still confounded Ianto that the anonymous victim he'd spent so many hours attempting to comfort had turned out to be Jack. How could he not have known? How could he not have recognized the man he spent nearly all his days and most of his nights with? The man he _loved_? Certainly, the body they'd found had been wasted and burned, but that was no excuse. He'd sensed something the very first time he'd looked at the victim. If only he had acted on that instinct, he could have spared himself weeks of worry, and Jack unimaginable suffering.

Ianto's eyes slid over to his passenger once again, and wondered if Jack felt the same. Of course, Jack was too forgiving to resent Ianto's failure to save him, but Ianto wouldn't have blamed him if he had. Perhaps that was the reason Jack hadn't said much since his return.

The others hadn't yet returned to the Hub when they arrived, which suited Jack well enough; he seemed anxious to divest himself of the too-small hospital scrubs they'd scrounged for him at Flat Holm before seeing anyone else. Ianto considered pointing out that Jack's clothes were by far the _least_ alarming aspect of his appearance just now, but he decided Jack had been through enough trauma without wounding his vanity as well.

Jack was still too weak to manage the ladder, so Ianto climbed down into his bunker and retrieved fresh clothing for him. He left Jack to change in his office and stepped out into the Hub to call Gwen. The news of Jack's return was met with predictable enthusiasm. "Jamiya!" he heard her shouting, even with the handset held well away from his ear. "Come quick!"

"What it is?" Jamiya's voice was more distant.

Jack, fumbling with the buttons of his shirt, leaned around the corner. "Did I just hear Gwen?"

Gwen's excited voice buzzed through the telephone. "Ianto, I'm putting you on speaker. Tell Jamiya what you just told me."

Ianto looked expectantly at Jack, who rolled his eyes and took the mobile from him. "Hi, Mum, I'm home," he quipped. There was a pause, then a rapid string of syllables too fast for Ianto to catch. "Yes, it's—no, that's why Ianto called to—I'm _fine_, mother. Just come back to the Hub, and I'll tell you all about it." He disconnected and tossed the mobile back to Ianto.

Ianto caught the phone, but stared at him. "You want them to come back right away?"

Jack arched his eyebrows. "You want to keep my mother waiting? You're a braver man than I am." He turned his attention back to his buttons. His atrophied fingers trembled as he tried to push them through the buttonholes.

"I just thought you might want to rest for a few minutes, you know, heal up a bit more before you see everyone. You know how worried Jamiya and Gwen will be if they see you looking like this." After watching Jack struggle for a moment, Ianto stepped closer and began to do up Jack's buttons for him.

Jack sighed and examined one of his arms, which was only marginally less blistered than when he'd awakened. "There's no telling how long that will take."

Ianto hummed thoughtfully. "If only there were something we could do to pass the time." He finished the last button, but let one hand linger on Jack's chest. "Which reminds me, I haven't welcomed you back properly. Welcome home, Jack." He leaned in, angling his lips to meet Jack's.

Jack's whole body tensed, and he pulled away, breaking the contact between them. He fumbled through a few false starts before managing, "I should… finish… getting dressed. Before the others get back."

After an awkward pause, Jack muttered something about shoes and vanished back into the office, leaving Ianto stunned at his reaction. Ianto had hardly expected Jack to be up for heavy snogging given his physical condition, but he had thought a little reunion kiss after their weeks apart would be welcome. Yet Jack, for whom the language of physical affection was a native tongue, had shied away from his kiss as though—

As though it weren't what he wanted.

As though Ianto weren't _whom_ he wanted.

Ianto tried to suppress his suspicion, but waves of insecurity dredged up old doubts. Why had Jack asked about the Doctor the moment he'd awakened? Who was the Mickey he'd mentioned? Why had Jack thought it was 2014, and how had he gotten to the near future when Jamiya had tracked him through the rift to a previous century? Whom had Jack been with while he was gone?

Why had he fled Ianto's touch as though he found it repellent?

Jack soon reappeared, fully dressed and shod, and flashed Ianto a tight smile. "That's better. I'm starting to feel like my old self again."

Ianto quelled his panic and forced an answering smile. _I can only hope_.


	35. Chapter 35

"Jack!" Gwen was the first to burst through the cog doors. She bolted up the steps, arms swinging out in preparation to throw around Jack when she reached him.

Ianto stepped forward to intercept her. "Careful!" he warned. "No rugby tackles. He's hurt."

Gwen's joy melted into concern. "Hurt? Badly?" She stopped and took a closer look at Jack, taking in the sun-bleached hair, withered limbs and blistered skin. "Good God, Jack, what happened to you?"

"Still working that out," Jack said. He was propped against a desk, arms crossed gingerly over his chest. There was a shadow of some unhappy emotion on his face, and Ianto caught his eyes straying to Gwen's midsection.

Ianto doused the flare of old jealousy with an effort of will. Wherever and whenever Jack had been, he _couldn__'t_ have been with Gwen. They'd moved beyond that. Gwen was happily married to Rhys now, and Jack…

Well. Jack _had_ seemed happy with Ianto. There was no guarantee he still was.

Ianto shook that thought from his head and stood aside for Jamiya to reach her son. Jack accepted a careful embrace from his mother, murmuring words of reassurance.

"You look awful," Jamiya told him, touching his face—the only part of him that didn't bear the marks of exposure and severe sunburn. "Are you sure you shouldn't see a doctor?"

Ianto was already watching Jack closely, so he caught the flicker of dismay before it was replaced with a plastic smile. "It's not as bad as it looks. I'll heal soon enough."

Ianto bit his lip. Jack _had_ asked about the Doctor immediately upon waking up. Was it possible…?

"Well, well, well." That was John Hart arriving. "Guess you really can survive anything. Though you should fire your stylist."

Ianto took a modicum of pleasure from the fact that Jack didn't move to greet Hart, and only scowled at him from where he stood. "I'm surprised you're still here."

Hart shrugged. "I'm your mother's ride home, remember? I didn't think you'd want me to strand her here."

Gwen headed off a more lengthy exchange of barbs before it could develop. "Tell us what happened, Jack," she pleaded. "We've been so worried. Where did the rift take you?"

Jack's lips thinned. "I'm not sure I know, exactly. A lot happened to me, but…" He hesitated. "Actually, I'm not even sure it did, here."

Gwen frowned. "What does that mean?"

Before Jack could answer, the cog door alarm sounded again. They turned to see Martha Jones stepping through the cage.

"Martha?" Gwen cocked her head to one side. "What are you doing here?"

Martha stared at her for a moment, then glanced around at the assembled party. "What do you mean, what am I doing here? You've left me a dozen frantic voicemails over the past week. When I left the test site and found them, I rerouted my flight to come here directly. What's the emergen…" Her eyes landed on Jack and widened. "What the _hell? _Jack, what's happened to you?"

"Long story." Jack's gaze on Martha was soft and almost wistful, as it had been with Gwen. "Good to see you, Martha."

Martha dropped the bag she was carrying and hurried over to take a closer look at Jack. "These are _burns_. And…" She reached up to touch his hair, and a clump came loose in her fingers. "Your hair is falling out! Did you crawl into a radiation chamber or something?"

"Radiation, yes. Chamber, not exactly." Jack looked at her curiously. "I thought you said you weren't coming back unless the world was ending?"

"The way Gwen sounded on the phone, I thought it might be." Martha continued looking him over. "Besides, she said you were in trouble. I make exceptions for rescuing personal friends."

Jack smiled at that—the first true smile Ianto had seen on his face since he'd awakened. "Thanks."

Martha had pushed up one of Jack's sleeves and was examining his arm. "What treatment have you had so far?"

"None. I just got back. Not that I need—"

"Well, good news, you're getting treated now." Martha hauled him toward the medical bay. Jack, too weak to resist, could only stumble after her. The others parted around them, then followed in their wake.

Jack pulled weakly against her grip as they descended the stairs. "Martha, you don't have to, I'll heal on my own—"

"Shut up." She cornered him and moved into his space until he scooted up onto the autopsy table. "I didn't change my ticket and fly overnight to Cardiff to be told I'm not needed. You've got a doctor on site, and so help me, I'm going to do what I trained to." She spun away and began scrubbing her hands at the sink. "If UNIT doesn't want to take advantage of my medical skills, at least Torchwood can benefit from them once in a while. And I'm not going to stand here and look at you in that condition and _not_ do something to help. Now," she returned to the table, carrying a burn kit, "take off your shirt."

Jack stared morosely down at his buttons. "I… may need some help with that. My hands aren't working quite right."

Martha just shook her head. "And you said you didn't need treatment."

* * *

Whatever token protests he might have made, Jack was as grateful for Martha's insistence that she treat his injuries as he had been for her timely arrival. He wasn't ready to answer Gwen's questions—wasn't even _capable_ of answering most of them—and he was legitimately suffering from the burns, dehydration and emaciation that had wrecked his body. He didn't particularly enjoy the treatments, but he hoped they would take the edge off the pain until he recovered fully.

Martha made a more thorough examination once she learned that Jack had been the victim of one of the alien parasites. "There's definitely some skull damage here," she said as she ran an ultrasound probe across his temple. "Looks like it did the same thing to you as it did to the other man it killed. Cut a hole right through your skull into the brain. The bone isn't fully closed up yet. Any luck finding out what those facehugger things actually are?" She directed the question to the group as a whole. "Or figuring out how to stop them?"

"We closed the portals," Jamiya volunteered. "Hopefully that will keep any more from coming through."

"We also learned they aren't bulletproof," Gwen added. "So if any more _do_ show up, we can kill them."

"Hart thought he might know what species they were," Ianto said, "but we didn't have records on them in our database."

"Who's Hart?" Martha asked.

The question surprised Jack until he remembered that this Martha hadn't been around for his ex-partner's previous visits, and the Martha who had worked with Hart in 2014 didn't yet exist—or possibly never would, in this timeline. He made introductions from his recumbent position on the table, pointing. "John Hart. Jamiya Thane. Martha Jones."

Martha waggled the transducer in greeting. "Hello."

"Nice to meet you," Jamiya said. Hart swept his eyes over Martha approvingly and gave a saucy wink.

Martha ignored him. "Did you check with UNIT about the aliens?" she continued as she wiped the ultrasound gel from Jack's face with a paper towel.

"Didn't have the chance. We're not on the best of terms with UNIT brass right now. We couldn't reach you, and I haven't been able to hack UNIT's database since they patched their firewall last year." Ianto tucked his hands in his pockets. "Tosh probably could have managed it, but I'm not the expert she was."

"I can make some calls when I'm finished up here," Martha offered. "I can't guarantee we'll have anything on them, but it's worth checking." She patted Jack lightly on the shoulder. "Up you come, Jack."

Jack allowed himself to be helped into a sitting position. "Am I free?"

"For now." Martha searched through a cabinet and handed him a bottle of pills. "Here. I suspect antibiotics are pretty much overkill where you're concerned, but since you're healing more slowly than usual, I'd rather play it safe. Take two of these every eight hours, preferably with food. I'm not going to wrap all the burns, but I want clean coverings on them twice a day. Something like a long-sleeved T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms would be fine, as long as they're cotton. If the blisters haven't healed up by morning, put more of this topical cream on them. All right?"

Jack nodded, too weary to argue. "Anything else?"

"Drink a lot of water. Better yet, drink something with electrolytes. Ianto, do you keep any sports drinks here?"

"I can pick some up," Ianto offered quickly. "I'll run out to the shops on the way to pick up supper." Ianto turned to him, almost tentatively. "Jack, what would you like me to bring you?"

Jack's stomach rolled at the thought of food. "Nothing," he said. For an instant Ianto's brow furrowed, and then his expression went blank. Jack didn't have the energy to work out what that meant.

"You should eat something when you take those pills," Martha reminded him. "Even if it's just an energy bar."

"I'm really just tired," Jack lied. "I think I need to rest and heal a bit before I try to put down any food. Why don't we call it a night and pick this up in the morning?"

The others exchanged uncertain glances. "Are you sure you want us to leave, Jack?" Gwen asked. "I mean, you can rest if you need to, but it's only the middle of the afternoon."

"And if I know you, you've been working double shifts to keep things under control while I was gone." Jack forced a smile. "Go on, take the night off. Set the rift monitor to remote alert and go have a nice dinner with your family."

Gwen blinked. "My what?"

"Husband. I mean Rhys." Jack swept the slip aside with a wave of his hand. "See how tired I am? Words are failing me. Goodnight, all, I'm going to bed." Jack slid off the autopsy table and began pulling himself up the stairs.

"Don't forget to take your antibiotics first," Martha called after him.

Jack waved the bottle without looking back. "I will."

Familiar footsteps followed him to his office. Jack paused in the doorway to let them catch up. "Ianto, I'll be fine. You don't have to babysit me."

Ianto hovered an arm's length away. "I thought you might want some help getting down the ladder."

Jack nearly accepted his assistance, until he met Ianto's eyes and saw the earnest concern there.

_I__'ll never leave you, Jack. I'll always take care of you_.

The memory of the other Ianto's whispered words and tender gaze stabbed through him, and Jack's throat burned against sudden tears. He spun away before this Ianto could witness his distress. "I'm fine," he choked out, emotion roughening his voice. "Go home."

Ianto withdrew with obvious reluctance. A part of Jack wanted to call him back; he knew _any_ version of Ianto would comfort him, tend to his needs, and selflessly offer him whatever distraction he needed in that moment. But it wouldn't be fair to this Ianto to use him to drive away Jack's grief at being separated from the Ianto who truly loved him. Jack didn't know exactly where he'd been or what had happened, but he knew he needed time and solitude to work through the feeling of loss that squeezed the air from his lungs. He may have been less physically tired than he'd let on, but emotionally, he was completely wrung out.

In his quarters, Jack stripped his remaining clothes with difficulty, and decided there was no need to bother with long protective garments when his cotton bedsheets would do the same job. He gingerly crawled into bed, decided even the light pressure of the sheets over his skin was uncomfortable, and draped himself naked across the narrow mattress.

_We have got to get a bigger bed down here. Or just start going back to mine at night._

He wasn't sure how long he lay awake, listening to the familiar sounds of the Hub, focusing on the dull throb of discomfort from his full-body burns to avoid feeling the deeper pain that plagued his soul. A draft of cold air blew across his inflamed, exposed skin, and he missed the warmth of Ianto's body curled against his. Instinctively, he reached across the bed to pull his lover closer, but his hand encountered only cold, empty sheets.

_I__'m yours, Jack, for as long as you'll have me. I'll stay with you._

_Forever._

Jack tried to push the memory away like all the others, but it left him hollow, his core gouged out by the only true, unblemished happiness he'd known in decades. The ecstasy of finding someone to accompany him through his long life, to shield him from the living hell of his immortality, made the sudden return to loneliness almost unbearable. He was a starving man, presented with an infinite banquet, only to have the food crumble to dust in his mouth.

At last, unable to deny what he'd lost, Jack surrendered to the tears he'd been suppressing for hours. The waves of grief battered him long and hard, and hurt more than any part of his broken body.

* * *

Ianto stood in Jack's office, carrier bag forgotten in his hand. He'd only returned to the Hub to deliver the electrolyte drinks and simple foods Martha had recommended, in case Jack wanted them before morning. He hadn't intended to disturb Jack. He certainly hadn't meant to spy on him.

The sound of Jack's quiet sobs drifted up the ladder and overlaid the roar in Ianto's ears.

Ianto's instinct was to fly to Jack's side and comfort him, but the memory of the earlier aborted kiss held him back. _You aren__'t the one he wants_, a sinister voice whispered in the back of his mind. _He__'s grieving someone he left behind, wherever he's been. Someone he_ loved.

Ianto pressed his eyes shut and fought tears of his own. He'd been so certain Jack cared for him before he'd fallen through the rift, but whatever had happened to Jack while he'd been gone had clearly changed things. Jack had fled Ianto's touch—something he'd never done in the year and a half since they'd become involved—and had brusquely ordered him to leave when Ianto had offered his help. The way he had avoided eye contact and shut Ianto out, Jack seemed even less interested in him now, after months of dating, than he had been back when they were just casually shagging.

But Ianto _loved_ him—more than he'd thought possible, he'd realized in that epiphany a week before. Ianto had sustained himself with the promise that when Jack returned, he would tell him how he felt, even devote himself wholeheartedly to Jack's happiness, if Jack would have him. Ianto loved him, and yet… Jack had evidently fallen in love with someone else.

The pessimistic voice in Ianto's mind reminded him that it wasn't the first time something like this had happened. He didn't know the sordid details, but Toshiko had shared enough about what had happened with Jack's namesake in 1941 for Ianto to realize his place—or lack thereof—in Jack's affections at that time. But that had been before Jack came back—_for you_, he'd said. Ianto had been convinced that things were different now, that they were in a proper relationship, that Jack really wanted him, but… perhaps he had only deluded himself. Perhaps he'd been mistaken all along about what was between himself and Jack. He wanted to believe in Jack's sincerity, but nothing seemed certain in light of his changed behavior.

Sighing bitterly, Ianto deposited the bag on Jack's desk and turned to go home, as he'd been ordered to an hour before. There was no point punishing himself by staying here, and in any case, he had no right to witness Jack's private display of grief.

Try as he might to block them out, the echoes of Jack's sobs rang in Ianto's ears for the rest of the night.


	36. Chapter 36

"So. Kantrofarri," Martha began.

They were all seated around the briefing room table, where they'd assembled at Martha's request. She had spent the morning in communication with UNIT, requesting information and compiling a dossier on the facehuggers once she'd obtained the species name and preliminary information from John Hart. A file photo of one of the crustacean-like aliens was now displayed on the screen behind her.

Jack suppressed a shudder as he stared at the thing that had apparently been clinging to his face for weeks. He normally entertained a certain amount of morbid curiosity when it came to alien life forms, but if it hadn't been for his desperate need to make sense of his distorted memories and inconsistent timelines, he would have been just as happy skipping this briefing entirely.

"UNIT first came across them from secondhand reports in the early 1980s, but didn't get their hands on a live specimen until about fifteen years later. We didn't have the formal name in our database; they were just listed as 'dream crabs,' due to their resemblance to arthropods—though they're not related in any way. In fact, the Kantrofarri are like nothing we have on Earth." She clicked to the next image, which showed a diagram of the creature's physical structure. "This is a theoretical anatomical model. It's impossible to get an accurate one even through dissection, because when these aliens die, their cells somehow lose cohesion, leading to immediate disintegration."

Ianto's head came up. "That happened to the one that was—well. When Jack revived, it turned to dust."

Martha nodded. "The prevailing theory is that their bodies' internal structures are electromagnetic. The brain supplies a low-level bioelectric charge that holds them together. Stun the brain, or kill it, and their cells depolarize and come apart."

"Kinky," John Hart drawled from the far end of the table.

Gwen turned to stare at him in disbelief. "What part of that is kinky? No—don't tell me. Please."

"It is kind of interesting, from a scientific perspective," Jamiya observed.

Martha didn't allow them to derail her presentation. "The other interesting thing about this species is that they have no sensory perception centers of their own. No eyes, no ears, no olfactory receptors. As near as our researchers could tell, they hunt telepathically. They're harmless until you see or hear them, but once you do, they use the telepathic feedback of your own perceptions to track you down and attack."

"Come on, there's no denying _that__'s_ kinky," said Hart.

"No, it's just terrifying," Jamiya countered. "Why do they attack humans?"

"They're predators—not just of humans, but of any species with developed brains. They feed on neural tissue." Martha put up another image, this one an ultrasound of a human cranium. There were visible holes at the temple. "They latch on, bore through the skull, liquefy the brain, and absorb it."

"Like drinking a milkshake through a straw," Hart commented. He illustrated with a long, loud slurp from his takeaway cup.

Gwen shot him a dirty look. "Can you _not?_"

Martha continued before their exchange could gather steam. "When I examined Jack yesterday, I found the same kind of damage to his skull. Normally victims of the Kantrofarri die within days, but I'm guessing Jack's healing capabilities kept him alive for longer than the average."

"We know that for certain," Ianto pointed out. "He was in Flat Holm for weeks, under observation. The doctors had no idea why he was still alive."

Martha turned to Jack. "Of course, the Kantrofarri eventually drained you to the point that you died, but when you revived, I have to assume the telepathic feedback sent it into shock, and its vital systems stopped functioning. When that happened…" She mimed an explosion with her hands. "Crab dust. That process probably took _months, _though. We don't know how long you were gone before you fell back through the rift—earlier—but your clothes were all but burned away when you found… yourself." She shook her head. "Time loops are hell on grammar."

"They're pretty rough on the physique, too." Jack smiled grimly. "Months, huh? That thing probably thought it had found an all-you-can-eat buffet."

Martha shrugged. "That time frame would be consistent with the sun damage to your clothes and body."

Jack shook his head. "That could have happened in days, where I was. The whole time I was in that desert, I never saw the sun set."

Gwen brightened suddenly. "Oh, you were right, Ianto! It was a desert!"

Jack blinked. "What?"

"Ianto said he saw something like a desert through the portal. Come to think of it, there was a lot of sand in the area, too. It must have fallen through the rift when the Kantrofarri came through." Gwen leaned forward. "Were you unconscious _all_ that time, Jack?"

Jack still wasn't sure how he had fallen back through the rift once he'd landed in 2014, or at what point his timeline had split. He had obviously been unconscious for _part _of it, though. "I don't think so, but I'm not sure exactly where I ended up. Or when."

Jamiya was still staring at the screen. "Martha, you called them 'dream crabs,' a minute ago. The crab part I understand, but why dreams?"

"Ah, yes. That's the _other _other interesting thing about this species. I mentioned those secondhand reports a minute ago, right? The first mentions were in a set of anthropological documents on an alien civilization UNIT made contact with in the early eighties. I looked up those reports and did some reading, and it seems at least one culture uses the Kantrofarri as a means of euthanasia."

"Suicide? Those things?" Gwen's face contorted in revulsion. "There have got to be a thousand better ways to die."

"Maybe not," Martha said with a shrug. "You see, the Kantrofarri have a highly specialized mechanism to render their prey pliant while they feed on them: Apparently they use their telepathic link to create vivid, euphoric dreams. It's a one-way trip, but it must be a hell of a way to go, living out your fantasies."

Every eye at the table swiveled toward Jack, who wanted nothing more than to barricade himself in a small, dark space until he could work out exactly what this meant. It _couldn__'t_ have been a dream, could it? No—it had been too vivid, too complex to be a dream. It _must _have been real.

"Jack?" Gwen prompted. "Is that true? Did you have a euphoric dream?"

"I…" Jack faltered, glanced around the table, then shook his head. "No, I wasn't dreaming. But I think I slipped through to an alternate timeline, somehow."

John Hart leaned forward, suddenly interested. "If you did, you shouldn't be able to remember it."

"Unless there was some sort of anomaly, right?" Martha glanced between the former Time Agents. "Like a major paradox event?"

Hart shrugged. "Yeah, but how often do those happen?"

"More often than you'd think," Martha murmured, but turned her attention back to Jack. "Are you sure you didn't just _dream _of an alternate timeline, Jack?"

Jack shook his head. "I don't think any part of it was a dream. Where I was seemed completely real. Normal." It had to have been a different timeline, or a parallel universe, or something. It _had_ to. Jack couldn't believe that what had happened between himself and his Ianto had merely been some kind of hallucination. It had been too raw, too complex, too intense to be anything but reality.

"I suppose it would have to seem real," Martha mused. "You've had psychic defense training, right? The Kantrofarri would have to produce a dream your brain wouldn't perceive as abnormal and reject. And probably drawn from your own memories, since they're telepathic."

"Probably something to keep you totally satisfied and complacent." Hart leered. "I can just imagine what that might—ouch!" He bent to rub his shin, glaring daggers at Gwen.

Gwen turned back to Jack, her eyes sparkling with undisguised curiosity. "So what was it like?"

Jack knew if he said he didn't want to talk about it, they would only speculate more and press him harder for answers, and he was not about to share his most private secrets with anyone aside from the man he loved—who was still lost in another time. "I can't really remember," he temporized.

Ianto—not the Ianto who had given up his mortality and vowed to love Jack for thousands of years, Jack was reminded, but the younger, cleanshaven Ianto who had never made any sort of love declaration at all—had remained curiously silent throughout the discussion. Now he spoke. "You thought it was 2014, remember?" he prompted quietly. "You asked about the Doctor."

Jack stole a glance at him, but Ianto was looking down at his folded hands, his face uncharacteristically blank. Jack quickly looked away, only to catch his mother's thoughtful gaze flicking between the two of them.

"The Doctor?" Martha's eyebrows lofted. "You dreamed about him?"

"I didn't _dream_ of him." Jack's hope of emerging without discussing the deeply personal experience began to shrivel. "He picked me up off that planet I landed on. Dropped me off in the near future. That's all."

"So you were in the future?" Gwen was leaning forward over the table. "What happened?"

"It was just Torchwood. Business as usual."

"The only thing usual about Torchwood is that it's usually unusual."

"Business as _un_usual, then," Jack snapped. "What does it matter?"

"But was it a _good_ dream?" Gwen pressed. "It must have been, if it kept you contented for months."

"I told you, it wasn't a dream! I was just a few years in the future. Then somehow I slipped back into this timeline, I don't know how, and got attacked by one of those crab things."

"When did you arrive?" Jamiya asked suddenly.

"In 2014. Five years from now."

"Not that," Jamiya said. "I mean when you first went through the rift and landed in the desert. Do you know what century you arrived in?"

Jack thought back to the previous week—it _had_ only been a week, hadn't it?—when the Doctor had found him. "Twenty-fourth, I think. According to the Doctor, anyway."

Jamiya shook her head slowly. "That's not right. We tracked your energy signature. You were two hundred years in the _past_, not the future."

The sand began to slip from beneath Jack's feet, and he clung desperately to his memories. "Look, I can't help it if the rift is unpredictable."

"There has to be a way to work it out, though," Gwen pressed. "Why don't you tell us what you remember, and we'll figure out if you really were there?"

"I can't tell you about the future, Gwen."

"That's only if it really _is_ the future," she said. "But to know for certain, we need to try to reconcile your experiences—"

"I'm not telling you!" Jack snapped. He pressed his fingertips into his eyes, both to suppress the tears he knew were inevitable and to keep himself from punching something. "Bad enough I've had that thing digging into my head for months, and now you all want a shot at my brain, too? Sorry, the buffet's closed. You'll have to psychoanalyze someone else for your weekend entertainment."

To her credit, Gwen looked chagrined. "I'm sorry, Jack. I didn't mean to upset you."

Jack blew out a breath. It wasn't right to take this out on his friends. He needed to be alone, to sort out what was real and what wasn't. "Look, I don't have the energy to do this right now. I've just had my brain cored by an overgrown shellfish, and my head still…" He trailed off as his eyes went to the image of the cranial ultrasound on the screen. The shadowy hole in the side of the skull stood out in stark contrast to the bone. _…still hurts._

"Jack?" Martha frowned. "Are you feeling all right?"

Jack's fingers went to his temple. The ache was dull, fading to the background when he wasn't focusing on it, but if he pressed a little with his fingertips, the pain felt exactly like the post-concussive relapses he'd suffered the entire time he'd been in 2014.

Except he'd never _been_ in 2014. This headache was the damning evidence. All that time, he'd been unconscious in an off-planet desert, dreaming of a world where his deepest wish could be fulfilled, yet suffering periodic headaches because his skull had been penetrated by an alien mandible. He'd thought he'd been gradually recovering from a concussion in his dream, while in the real world, his body's accelerated healing was only just keeping time with the damage the Kantrofarri was wreaking on his brain. He'd dreamed of love and reconciliation as the sun and sand scoured the flesh from his body.

None of it had been real. None of those precious memories had actually happened. And Ianto…

Jack stared hard at the table. He couldn't bring himself to look at this Ianto. The _only_ Ianto, he corrected himself sharply. The idealized Ianto of his dream—irresistibly handsome, commanding, passionate, devoted—was an enlargement of the reality, but now Jack realized the shattering truth: That Ianto who loved him beyond measure, who had sacrificed _everything_ for him, had merely been a product of his own wishful thinking. What had transpired between Jack and Ianto in the dream was nothing more than fantasy. In reality, Ianto hadn't done anything so demonstrative as sacrificing his mortality. He had never even made any profession of love to Jack.

What the events of his dream suggested Jack felt for _him, _on the other hand, was a complicated tangle better left for lengthy and private introspection.

Hands closed on Jack's arms, and he looked around to find his mother supporting his shoulders. "You need to rest," she said firmly. Jack began to protest that he'd done little else _but_ rest since awakening, but she marched him out the door and down the corridor back toward his office. "Don't argue. I'm putting you to bed, and you're going to stay there until you're capable of completing sentences without looking as though you're about to faint."

Jack quickly grasped that this meant being left to himself for a while, and while he wasn't anxious to be alone with the truth he'd just discovered, he was also aware that if he didn't go someplace private, he was in very real danger of breaking down in front of his team and John Hart. He followed her complacently to his quarters, sinking further into despair with each step.


	37. Chapter 37

Ianto stared into the familiar blue eyes so close to his own and summoned his courage. "Jack," he began, "there's something I've been meaning to tell you. While you were gone, I realized… well… I'm in love with you."

Ianto held his breath. The eyes staring back at him showed a flash of uncertainty before rolling in aggravation. They vanished completely from his view as he let his head drop forward, forehead pressing against the cool mirror. "No, that's rubbish," he moaned. "I can't just blurt it out like that." He pulled back, looked hard at his reflection again through the broad smudge his face had made on the glass, and tried another approach: "Jack, I'm sure you already know, but I love you. Just thought I ought to mention, in case you hadn't realized…"

No, that was even worse. "I love you, Jack." Too direct. "Jack, what would you say if I told you I loved you?" Too _in_direct. "Hey there, lover. Funny, did you ever notice that the word 'lover' has 'love' in it?" Too absurd. "I couldn't help falling in love with you." Too clichéd. "Jack, my love…" Too mortifying.

Ianto growled in frustration and shoved away from the sink. He'd promised himself again and again that he'd confess his feelings to Jack, given the chance, but perhaps determining such a course of action _before_ Jack's return had been premature. After all, Jack had never once indicated that he felt the same way; wouldn't it be a source of embarrassment to him if Ianto made any kind of declaration? Especially now—Martha's briefing had all but confirmed that Jack had been with someone else while he was gone, or at least _thought_ he had. Ianto had watched Jack's face change when he realized that he'd been in a Kantrofarri-crafted dream all this time. Ianto didn't know the details, but he recognized heartbreak when he saw it, and Jack had had the look of a man who had just lost the love of his life.

Which, Ianto reminded himself with another critical glance in the mirror, was decidedly _not _a twenty-five-year-old Welsh coffee boy with insomnia-induced dark circles beneath his eyes. Even if he'd considered himself in Jack's league, even if he'd been at his very best, he could hardly compete with whatever—whomever—Jack had dreamed of in some idealized fantasy. Jack himself had made that clear enough; he'd scarcely even _looked_ at Ianto since his return.

Perhaps it would be easier not to press, now that there was already some distance between them. He could just let Jack go. Move on. Be grateful for the time they'd had together, but recognize that it was over.

Only he didn't _want_ it to be over. The whole time Jack had been missing, Ianto had thought of nothing and no one else. Ianto loved Jack, and he knew that Jack… well, at least _cared_ for him, if not loved him in quite the same way. Jack had seemed perfectly happy with Ianto before he'd fallen through the rift. Even though it had been weeks since he vanished, Jack thought he'd only been gone for a handful of days. How much could a man's heart truly change in that amount of time?

Perhaps the odds were stacked against him reclaiming Jack's affection, and perhaps it could never be quite the same as it had been before Jack had experienced… whatever he had experienced in his dream reality, but even a slim chance of winning Jack back had to be worth the risk of embarrassment or rejection. If Ianto didn't at least _try_ to tell Jack how he felt, he knew he would regret it for the rest of his life.

He just needed to find the right words. And the right moment. And the necessary courage, which he was definitely lacking just now.

With a sigh, Ianto unlocked the door and exited the loo. He nearly collided with Gwen, who was loitering in the corridor just outside. "Sorry," Ianto mumbled. "Didn't realize anyone was waiting."

"It's okay," Gwen smiled. "I'm not doing the dance of the desperate yet." She started to enter the bathroom, then hesitated and looked back at him. "Ianto, do you think…"

"Do I think what?" Ianto prompted when she didn't complete the question.

"It's just… Jack," she said, leaning against the doorjamb. "Do you think he's really all right?"

Ianto made an effort at concealing the emotional punch to his stomach that her question delivered. "He's been through a lot. It's bound to take him some time to recover. But he always does in the end, doesn't he?"

Gwen hummed thoughtfully. "I suppose. He just seemed… not himself, somehow. Maybe you should check in on him?"

"Don't know what I can do." Ianto shrugged and tried to look casual.

Judging by Gwen's expression, he'd failed. "Don't be daft. He confides in you—as much as he does in anyone, I mean. Maybe you can figure out what's bothering him."

"I think it's pretty clear what's bothering him." Ianto looked down the corridor toward the main area of the Hub, so there was less chance of Gwen seeing what was bothering _him_. "He's still trying to readjust to reality. Not to mention heal from those injuries. That crab thing physically destroyed his brain, and he's still dealing with second-degree burns over most of his body. Accelerated healing or no, that has to be taking a lot out of him. He's mentally and physically exhausted."

"I suppose that's true. I just wish there were something we could do to help him recover faster. I don't like seeing him suffer."

"You think any of us do?"

"I didn't mean it like that." Gwen sighed. "It must be even harder for you to see him like this." She fixed her eyes on him again. "But I guess that puts you in a better position to be there for him."

Ianto felt her gaze burning into him and surrendered to her insistence. "You know I'll do whatever I can for him, Gwen. But it's really up to Jack how much help he wants."

"I know. But I do think you stand the best chance of reaching him, considering how he feels about you. He isn't as likely to push you away."

Ianto recalled Jack ordering him to leave when he'd offered his help the previous night, and his stomach lurched again. "I guess we'll see."

Gwen didn't notice his distress; she had finally turned to enter the bathroom, and was now standing in the doorway, frowning at her reflection. "Did someone headbutt the mirror?"

* * *

Jack had been staring at the dim circle of light over his bed for well over an hour when he finally accepted that he was not going back to sleep. He rolled gingerly upright, donned some of the soft cotton clothing Martha had insisted on bringing him, and carefully climbed up through the hatch into his mostly-darkened office.

Jamiya glanced up from his desk, where she was reading his copy of _Scavengers In Space_ by the shaded desk lamp. "You're supposed to be resting."

Jack rolled his tight shoulders and winced as the still-healing skin resisted movement. "Wasn't having much luck."

"Too much noise in your head?" Jamiya set aside the paperback and stood, shoving the more comfortable desk chair toward him. "Sit. You look like you're about to fall over."

"I'm fine," Jack lied, but took the proffered seat gratefully. His body was slowly rebuilding its atrophied tissues, but climbing and standing were still fatiguing.

Jamiya moved around the desk to sit in the smaller chair near the door, keeping a critical eye on him. "So what's bothering you?"

Jack gave a humorless laugh. "Thought you could tell that by looking."

"Only the physical aspects, and something tells me that's not what's keeping you awake. If you were just in physical pain, you would take some of those drugs Martha keeps offering you and knock yourself out until you're fully healed."

Jack's memory of the other world was gradually fading, like that of any vivid dream, but his mother's frank observations reminded him of that intense conversation they'd never had. "You were like this in my dream, too," he murmured.

"Like what?"

He sighed deeply. "A brutal, unrelenting voice of reason. Though apparently that was all just my subconscious using your image to kick me into shape."

"Someone has to." Jamiya smiled gently and scooted her chair closer. "What's wrong, really? Talk through it. It will help."

"That dream I had…" Jack nearly faltered. "Well, for starters, the fact that it _was_ a dream. I was so sure it had all been real. I keep remembering things, and then I have to stop and think about whether or not they're real memories, or just something cooked up by a brain-eating parasite to tenderize me." Jamiya squeezed his hand in silent encouragement, and Jack pressed on. "Anyway, some things happened in the dream that… well, they would have changed my life completely. I believed they had. I thought things were going to be different for me now. But none of it really happened."

"So that's what's troubling you? You're mourning what might have been? Or rather, what you dreamed had been?"

"Something like that." Jack toyed with the well-worn paperback, fanning the page corners meditatively. "But even though I know it wasn't real, it's still making me question the way things _are_, and I don't really know where that leaves me."

Jamiya nodded thoughtfully. "You don't want to make important decisions based on something that never happened, but if it was your subconscious making suggestions, you think there might be a reason to reevaluate your current situation."

It was a more succinct summary than he could have managed in his current state. "Yeah. That."

"But nothing _here_ has changed," Jamiya pointed out. "So what you really need to consider is whether or not your dream-informed perspective can be applied to the situation here and now. Anything else is really irrelevant, regardless of the emotional impact."

Jack blinked. "Run that by me again?"

"You've got to isolate data based on their application to the real world."

Jack shook his head helplessly. "You've just gone all engineer on me, and I'm not sure my brain's up to the task right now."

"Here, I'll give you an example." Jamiya picked up a ballpoint pen off of Jack's desk. "Let's say that in this reality, you always write with this pen. It's your favorite pen, you like writing with it, and it's never failed to write when you need it to." Next she reached for a pencil. "Then in a dream reality, you discover a high-tech pencil that's capable of correcting your spelling and adding sums for you while you're writing. It's so much more convenient, you start writing with a pencil all the time. In fact, it's such a life-changing revelation, you even decide to invest in a pencil factory. You retire from Torchwood, become a successful pencil manufacturer, and make so much money you can now afford to live in a gilded palace with pencil-shaped finials on the front gates." She lay both writing utensils on the desk, side-by-side. "And when you wake up, you find yourself missing your pencil palace and the cutting-edge pencil industry. Follow me?"

Strangely enough, Jack did. Mostly.

"But in _this_ reality—the reality you've awakened to—pencils are just ordinary pencils. No matter how marvelous self-correcting pencils seemed in the dream world, they simply don't exist in real life. So while there's a part of you still convinced that pencils are superior to pens—which may have been true in your dream—that position is extrapolated from inapplicable data. Which means there's absolutely no advantage to your opening a pencil factory in _this _world. Maybe you have a new appreciation for what a pencil _could_ be, conceptually, but if you actually need to write something in the here and now, all the data indicate that this old, reliable pen will serve you better."

It sounded so simple when she said it, but Jack knew his emotions weren't as uncomplicated as plotted data points. "But what if I still can't get the pencil out of my head?"

"That's easy." Jamiya rolled the ballpoint across the blotter, where it bumped into Jack's fingers. "Try writing something. Maybe, once you're holding the pen in your hand again, you'll recall what you always loved about it. Or maybe you'll try it, and realize there are other ways of holding a pen, or different colors of ink to try, and you'll change some things about the way you write. But no matter the outcome, I guarantee writing with the pen will always be more satisfying than clinging to some fanciful dream about a pencil. The pen will put ink right there on the page where you can see it. That's something an imaginary pencil can never do."

Jack spent a moment absorbing this, then stared up at her in profound astonishment. "You just distilled an existential dilemma into an object lesson about writing implements, and somehow it not only made sense, it… made _damn good _sense. How the hell do you _do_ that?"

"All mothers are infinitely wise. It's part of the secret maternal contract." She rose to her feet and nodded toward the door. "Your faithful pen has been finding excuses to lurk just outside your office for most of the afternoon, waiting for you to wake up. Are you ready to see him now, or are you still in the market for pencils?" Emphasizing her point, she dropped the pencil unceremoniously into a cup on Jack's desk.

Warmth crept up around Jack's ears at how easily she had worked out the source of his troubled state. "How did you know that's what this was about?"

"We're also preternaturally observant. Another line item in the mother contract." She kissed Jack's forehead. "I'll send Ianto in on my way out."


	38. Chapter 38

Despite the hints Jamiya had dropped concerning Ianto's motives for lurking nearby—less _dropped_, Jack mused, and more _launched at escape velocity_—Ianto was all business when he entered Jack's office a short time later.

"I've compiled a file for you of all the incidents that happened while you were, ah, indisposed," Ianto said, brandishing a manila folder before him like a shield. "Just the highlights, in case you wanted to catch up on the last few weeks. There really wasn't much worth your notice, but if you have any questions, I'd be happy to pull up the relevant reports for you. There's also a summary of Jamiya's analysis on the portals and how she closed them."

"Thanks." Jack watched as Ianto placed the folder in the center of his desk blotter, hung back for a second, then readjusted it to straighten the corners. "I'm sure you and Gwen handled everything just fine, but I'll look it over tomorrow."

"Since yesterday there's been no increase in rift activity from the area around Morrie's, so I think whatever Jamiya did must have worked. I think it's reasonable to assume we've seen the last of the facehuggers. For which we're all thankful." Ianto flashed a tight smile. "You most of all, I imagine."

"Yeah." Jack waited for him to drop his professional facade, to give any sign that Jack might be welcome to approach on a more personal level, but Ianto just continued straightening and shuffling things on his desktop. Jack wondered if his mother might have been wrong, for once. Ianto hadn't even tried to make eye contact with Jack since entering the office. And he seemed on edge, almost nervous in Jack's presence. It was out of character for him. In fact, Jack hadn't seen him behave this way since…

_Since the night I came back after my time away with the Doctor_. Jack cringed inwardly. No wonder Ianto was treading carefully. Jack certainly had a history of leaving without proper notice. Was this the third time he'd done so, or the fourth? There had been that time with the Committee, chasing after the Doctor, stopping the Daleks…

Ianto was absently sharpening a pencil—the very one Jamiya had used in her object lesson; Jack noted the touch of irony—and turned his back to Jack as he carefully brushed shavings into the wastebasket. "Are you feeling any better?" he asked casually.

"A little," Jack answered, easing closer. "Slowly getting back to normal."

"That's good. It's been a while since anything has been normal around here. We could all use some normal." Ianto replaced the pencil in the desk cup and began sorting paper clips into a tray.

Jack shrugged. "You and Gwen seem to have managed pretty well while I was gone."

Ianto's fingers fumbled, and a lone paper clip escaped to bounce across the blotter. "We coped. Because we had to."

"Well, you coped very capably."

"Thank you, but it's not a scenario I'm eager to relive."

"You and me both." Jack tried to smile, but a traitorous whisper in the back of his mind reminded him that there were parts of his recent experience he would have been only to happy to revisit. He summoned the grainy ultrasound image to mind and reminded himself that having his brain eaten alive had not been a pleasant diversion.

"Look, Jack, I…" Ianto stopped fiddling with the items on the desk and plunged his hands into his pockets. "I want to say something."

The unspoken _but I don__'t know how_ was uncomfortably loud, so Jack turned his full attention on him. "I'm listening."

Ianto searched the floor as though it might hold the proper wording. "You said that the dream world felt real to you."

"That's true."

"And you didn't know it wasn't real until you woke up?"

Jack shook his head. "Longer than that. Not until Martha's briefing this morning." He rubbed at his temple, which ached a bit less now. "It was a very convincing illusion."

"I imagine it must have been quite detailed, if it fooled you."

"It was. Memories, sensory perception, everything. I can still remember what… what certain things felt like." Jack thought of the neat beard Ianto had sported in his dream, the way it had tickled his face when they kissed. He stole a glance at this Ianto's softer jawline.

Ianto was staring hard at the desk. "Certain things," he echoed almost inaudibly. For an instant his face contorted in a pained expression, but he quickly smoothed it. "If the dream was designed to keep you happy, you… I'm sure you weren't alone. You must have been with someone you cared about. Someone you… loved."

Jack nodded, but said nothing.

Ianto swallowed. "It must have been hard for you to come back to reality."

There was no point in denying that. Jack looked away. "It wasn't real," he said quietly. "None of it."

"I know. That's what I want to say."

Jack blinked. "What?"

"No, I don't mean… That's not exactly what I…" Ianto swore softly, then took a deep breath and rushed onward. "Look, I'm no one's idea of perfection. I know I don't have all that much to offer, but I…" He met Jack's gaze and nearly faltered. "I'm _here_, Jack. And I… care about you. And even if I can't be the man of your dreams, I'm willing to try to be someone you want, if you think you could settle for someone ordinary."

Jack stared at Ianto, whose face had flushed nearly as red as his shirt, and who now looked as though he wanted to sink through the floorboards into Jack's subterranean bunker. Jack stood and rested his hands on Ianto's shoulders, squeezing gently until the younger man looked up at him. "Ianto, I'm not _settling_ for you."

Ianto's eyes went wide with raw hurt, and Jack hastened to rephrase his statement. "No—I don't mean it like that. I mean, you shouldn't think of yourself that way. Like you're some kind of… best-available option."

Ianto pulled away. "I get it. You don't have to spell it out."

"No! You don't get it." Jack scrubbed his hands over his face and growled in frustration. "I'm screwing up everything I mean to say."

Ianto's expression was shut and barred. "You've said enough. I'll just go."

"No! No, no, no, don't go, please." Jack hurried around the desk to intercept Ianto on his way to the door. "Listen, when I said you weren't the best option, what I meant was, you aren't a… a last resort, or someone I'm only settling for simply because you happen to be here. Understand?"

There was a long pause before Ianto answered, "I think so."

His answer lacked conviction, so Jack tried another approach. "Look: I'm not here, in this time and place, because I'm trapped here. I mean, I was, for a while, but when I met the Doctor again, I could have gone any place or time I wanted. I asked him to bring me back here because _here_ was where I wanted to be. Just like I'm not with you because I don't have any better options. Understand what I'm saying?"

"That you have better options?" Ianto looked appalled. "You needn't feel obligated to—"

"No! There are no better options."

"But you just said—"

"Forget whatever I said. Even if there were better options, I wouldn't want them. But there aren't."

"So… I _am_ your best available option?"

"No! Well, yes, technically, but no. I mean—" Jack closed his eyes. His head was beginning to ache again. "Hang on, now you've got me mixed up. Let's back up. How did we even get here?"

Ianto sighed deeply. "I said I may not be your ideal, but I'd make an effort. Then you went off on a tangent about… time travel, or something."

"Forget the time travel. I accept whatever it is you're offering, but not for the reasons you think you're offering it."

Ianto's brow furrowed in concentration. "So… that means…"

"_I want to be with you_," Jack burst. "Not just because you're available and willing, but because you're _you_."

"You… you do?" The confusion on Ianto's face deepened. "I thought you wanted to, well, break things off."

"What? No! What gave you that idea?"

"You've been avoiding me ever since you woke up." Ianto's gaze dropped to somewhere around Jack's middle shirt button. "You won't look at me, you've hardly spoken to me, and you haven't kissed me even onc—"

Jack dipped his head and cut those words off at the source. Ianto's lips were both comfortably familiar and newly exciting, his body solid and vital in Jack's arms. The sudden emotion welling in Jack's chest threatened to choke him, and he pulled away.

Ianto pretended not to notice the abrupt termination of the kiss, though the cautious look he'd worn when he entered the office returned to his face. "I'm sorry," Jack breathed. "It was just…"

"I know. You don't have to force yourself." Ianto smiled tightly. "It'll probably take some getting used to again."

Jack stared at him. "What do you mean?"

Ianto shrugged, but the gesture wasn't as casual as he tried to make it. "I just mean, I understand if coming back to me is a bit of a letdown after your perfect dream."

"All right. That's enough." Jack stepped back to arm's length. "This needs to stop, right now."

Ianto's face fell. "You do want to end things."

"No! I've just told you I don't."

"Then what—"

"I mean the self-denigration. This comparing-yourself-to-my-dream business. To start with, you don't know the first thing about who or what I dreamed about, so how can you presume to know how you'd compare to it?"

Ianto flushed and looked away. "You said it was idealized, designed to keep you happy and complacent. I imagine someone with your experience could dream up a pretty spectacular partner."

"It was idealized," Jack returned. "And it was spectacular. Do you want to know who my ideal dream partner was, Ianto?"

The spark of indignation nearly concealed the flash of pain in Ianto's eyes. "Not particularly."

"Well, too bad. I'm going to tell you anyway." Jack crossed his arms, defiant. "It was _you_."

Ianto's shoulders stiffened. "Don't lie to me, Jack. I don't like being patronized."

"I'm not lying! It was you. Ianto Jones. With one tiny differe—" Jack broke off suddenly and looked away.

Ianto's eyes narrowed. "What difference?"

Jack swallowed. He hadn't meant to reveal any of what had happened between his dream self and dream-Ianto, but it had slipped out in his frustration.

"What difference, Jack?" Ianto demanded again. Jack remained silent, and after a few seconds Ianto's shoulders slumped. "Forget it."

Ianto was nearly to the door when Jack managed to force out the words. "You'd extended your lifespan," he mumbled.

Ianto froze. "What did you say?"

Jack sighed. He didn't want to repeat the words, but Ianto, of all people, deserved honesty. "You had an artificially extended lifespan. You were going to live for thousands of years."

Ianto's nimble mind followed this revelation to its logical conclusion, and the hard set of his shoulders vanished as he returned to the desk. "With you?" Jack nodded miserably, and suddenly Ianto's arms were around him again—comforting this time, strong and confident in their sympathy. "Oh, Jack," he breathed. "You thought you wouldn't be alone. _That_ was your dream."

Jack buried his face in Ianto's neck. There was no need to answer.

After a minute or two, Ianto released him and gazed at him with wonder. "It really was me?"

"It really was." Jack grazed a thumb along Ianto's chin. The line of his jaw was beardless, but the skin beneath Jack's hand was warm and rough and undeniably _real_. "Of all the people I've ever known… you were the one I dreamed would stay with me forever."

"Why?" Ianto's eyes searched his face. "Why me?"

Jack didn't think words could adequately convey his reasons, so he explained himself with another searing kiss.


	39. Chapter 39

Jack stood in the door to his office and stared out into the Hub. It was peaceful now, in the early morning, the background hum of the facility's systems overlaid only by the faint trickle of water down the tower.

It was too quiet.

For a moment, Jack envisioned the Hub the way it had been in his dream: Crowded, cluttered, bustling with activity and energy as Martha, Mickey, the Doctor, even John Hart each contributed their own small storm of chaos to the atmosphere. It had been that way in real life, too, not long ago. Now Toshiko's workstation sat empty, and Owen's desk had become a repository for all the files and paperwork they were perpetually behind on.

"Jack?" From behind and below him, Ianto's voice climbed half an octave to land on a note of uncertainty.

"Up here." Jack turned and waited for him at the top of the ladder. He'd left Ianto slumbering in his bed after a night of tender passion—restrained, owing to Jack's weakened state, but no less sincere—but in retrospect, he probably shouldn't have left him to wake up alone. Their forced separation was too recent, especially given Ianto had only just been persuaded that Jack wasn't using him as a second-string substitute for something unattainable.

Ianto, deliciously tousled and wearing one of Jack's T-shirts, took his reassurance in the form of a leisurely kiss. He stroked a hand over Jack's shoulder. "What are you doing up here? Is something wrong?"

Jack shook his head. "Just thinking."

"What about?"

"Torchwood." Jack's eyes swept the Hub again. "The future. Moving on."

Ianto apparently didn't have a ready comment for that, so he gave a noncommittal hum and rested his chin on Jack's shoulder. "Would you like some coffee while you think?"

Jack laughed. "Has the answer to that question _ever_ been no?"

"Thought so." Ianto yawned and made his way to the kitchenette in the opposite corner of the Hub. "Any idea what time the others are coming in?"

Jack wandered after him. There was something quietly reassuring about the sight of Ianto making coffee that he needed just now. "Nope. What time have they been getting here?"

"It varies. I was thinking of having a shower, but not if there's a chance of John Hart dropping in."

"Go ahead, if you like. I won't let him interrupt you if he does show up."

Ianto glanced back at Jack with an artfully raised eyebrow. "I was planning on inviting you to join me."

"Oh?" Jack grinned. "In that case, I _definitely_ won't let him interrupt."

At that moment, to Jack's great disappointment, the cog door alarms sounded. "Morning!" Gwen called as she entered the Hub. She drew up short when she spotted Ianto in vest and pajama bottoms. "Oh… Am I interrupting? Because I can go walk around the block a few times if you two are…"

"Nope," Ianto cut her off. "Just starting the coffee before I get dressed. Back shortly." He hurried back to Jack's office and vanished through the hatch.

Jack sighed theatrically. "There go my morning plans."

"I _do not_ want to know." Gwen dropped her purse and jacket on her desk and stared at Jack for a moment before coming over to give him a quick hug. "It is really good to walk in and see you standing right here, Jack. We missed you."

Jack laughed gently as he returned the embrace. "Thanks. It's nice to know someone still wants me around."

"Were you in doubt?" Her eyes wandered in the direction of Jack's office. "Unless Ianto is taking Casual Fridays to a new level, it seems he was happy enough to have you back home."

_Home_. Jack let himself smile at that. He looked around the Hub once more, taking in the empty desks, then turned to face Gwen. "Actually… there's something I'd like you to do for me."

"Anything for you, Jack—within reason." She grinned. "What do you need?"

"I want you to go through the NHS registry and start compiling a list of likely candidates."

"Candidates for what?"

Jack drew a breath and released it, along with his anxiety. "A new team medic."

Gwen's eyes widened. "Are you sure?"

He nodded. "You're right. You've been right. I can't keep risking you and Ianto, and we need a full team if we're going to do what we need to do to protect this city. It's time Torchwood moved forward."

Gwen nodded, then impulsively hugged him again. "Thank you, Jack. I know this isn't easy for you." She looked up at him. "But you said it before—the end is where we start from."

"Yeah." Jack looked around the Hub, and somehow it didn't feel quite so empty. "I guess it is."

* * *

Ten minutes later, a cup of coffee miraculously appeared on the desk at Jack's elbow. He looked up at Ianto. "Wow. Have you been doing stealth training? I didn't even see you come up the ladder."

"That's because I didn't. I used the downstairs access corridor. Figured I'd give all our pets their morning feed before I started up here."

"I always forget that door is there." Jack sipped his coffee. "Please don't ever move to Kazakhstan or anywhere."

"Wasn't on my agenda for the day. Any particular reason?"

"Because I'd miss your coffee, and it's too long a commute to pick up a cup every morning."

Ianto seated himself on the edge of Jack's desk. "You'd miss my _coffee_?"

Jack grinned and let his hand rest on Ianto's knee. "Among other things."

"It's good to know where I rate in your estimation."

Jack hooked Ianto's necktie and pulled him down for a kiss, then gazed at him thoughtfully. "Hey, have you ever considered growing a beard?"

Ianto gave him a quizzical look. "Not since I went through my scruffy Indiana Jones phase when I was fifteen."

Jack traced a line along Ianto's cheek. "I think it would suit you."

"I think it would drive me mad. And you probably wouldn't enjoy the beard burn."

Jack shrugged. "I don't mind kissing people with beards."

Ianto arched an eyebrow. "That's not exactly what I meant."

Before Jack could explore that thought further, the cog door alarms sounded. Ianto, spotting the new arrivals through the office window, quickly removed himself from Jack's desk. "Your mother is here. And Hart," he added with less enthusiasm.

Jack went out to meet them. His mother's eyes flooded with relief when she saw him. "You're looking so much better today," she said, taking his arms gently. "There are hardly any blisters left."

Jack bent to kiss her cheek. "They'll be gone completely in a day or two. I heal fast."

"Pity." John Hart sauntered over to join the conversation. "Even your hair's almost back to normal. I kind of liked you blond."

"I didn't." Ianto planted himself at Jack's side and shot Hart a cutting look. "I could use a bit _less_ blond in my life, actually."

Hart shrugged and ran a hand over his own sandy hair. "We have more fun, is all I'm saying."

Ianto flashed a vicious smile. "I haven't heard any complaints."

"_Boys._" The single word was a whip-crack of matriarchal authority, and brought all three men to attention. Jack blinked from his mother to John Hart, who was looking almost _contrite_.

Ianto used the cease-fire to make a strategic reposition. He smiled winningly at Jamiya. "I'll just go start some tea for you, shall I?"

"Hey!" Hart protested to Ianto's retreating back. "Don't I get any coffee?"

"Do you deserve coffee?" Ianto replied without turning.

"Do you really want to deal with me _without_ coffee?" Hart growled.

"By all means, continue making threats. In fact, if you persist in demanding coffee, I will bring you a cup." Ianto looked back and narrowed his eyes meaningfully. "Of _something_."

Apparently accustomed to these verbal skirmishes, Jamiya tucked her hand through Jack's elbow and led him a short distance away. "Jack, I've had a talk with John, and I think it's best for everyone involved if he takes me back home tomorrow."

Jack's eyes widened. "So soon? I thought you might stay a while."

"I have stayed a while. Over a month, now. I hate to think of how much you owe that hotel."

"Money is not an issue. You can extend your visit as long as you want."

Jamiya shook her head. "If I let myself stay as long as I'd like to, you'd never be rid of me. But every parent has to let go eventually, and now that I know that you're safe, and settled here, and that you have good friends to look after you, I won't worry as much. Besides, I've accomplished what I came for. I wanted to visit you, and I wanted to see Gray."

At the mention of his brother, Jack's eyes clouded, and Jamiya squeezed his hand. "It really wasn't your fault," she said gently. "I hope you can forgive yourself someday."

Jack wasn't ready to face that discussion. "Are you sure you'll be all right when you get home? I don't like to think of you being all by yourself." He looked a little sheepish. "I used to worry about that a lot, even when I didn't have any way to reach you."

"I'm not entirely isolated. I do have friends of my own, you know," she chuckled. "And I've been supporting myself just fine for years. I'm actually anxious to get home. I asked my neighbor to look after Chekkie while I was gone, but I've never left him this long. I miss him."

"You still have Chekkie?" Jack smiled wistfully. "He must be pretty old by now."

"He's slowing down, but still healthy. He's a lot bigger now than he was when you brought him home in your pocket." She held her hand a little above knee height. "Pittles never really stop growing, you know."

"I'm glad he's still with you. Give him a scratch behind the ears for me."

"I will. You know, if you ever find the means, you're welcome to come visit us yourself."

Jack sighed and tapped his vortex manipulator. "If I could just get this thing working again, I'd do that."

"Well, maybe the spare parts you need will drop through the rift, or you'll figure something else out. At least you'll always know where—and when—to find me."

_And I have plenty of time_, Jack thought, though he was hesitant to remind his mother of his immortality again on the eve of her return. "If you're leaving tomorrow, do you have plans for the rest of your time here?"

"Not really. I can help you save the world some more, if that's what's on your agenda."

Jack shook his head. "We'll let someone else save the world today. Let's get in some quality time before you go. You can tell me what you've been getting up to on the Boeshane Peninsula, and I'll show you around my city."

"I'd like that." Jamiya smiled up her son. "I'd like that a lot."


	40. Chapter 40

Ianto stood at a respectful distance as the little group gathered around the invisible lift to make their farewells. The evening drizzle had chased most of Cardiff's citizenry away from the Plass, so Jack had suggested that his mother and John Hart depart from ground level, rather than risk triggering any of the Hub's security systems by attempting to teleport out of the underground facility. Ianto kept an eye out for wandering tourists, though he knew the perception filter would prevent them from witnessing the moment of departure.

"It's going to be awfully quiet around here without you." Gwen embraced Jamiya.

"Admit it." Hart grinned and nudged Gwen with his elbow. "You're going to miss me. Just a teensy bit."

"The only thing I'll miss is having a built-in food waste disposal unit about the place. Better than a compost bin, you are. You'll eat any old garbage." Gwen turned back to Jamiya, and her tone gentled again. "You have everything you need for your trip?"

The older woman chuckled. "It's not as though it's a long voyage. Time travel can be a bit disorientating, but it's direct. Thank you for everything, Gwen. It was lovely to meet you."

"You, too." Gwen smiled. "Be safe."

Jamiya turned to Ianto and, to his surprise, extended her arms to him. When he stepped forward, she placed her hands on his shoulders. "You take good care of my boy, Ianto."

Ianto ignored John Hart pulling a face behind Jamiya's back. "I'll do my best."

"And look after yourself, too." Surprising him further, Jamiya pulled him into a hug. "I'm glad he has you," she murmured into his ear. "I think you're good for him, and I can see you make him happy."

Ianto's face warmed, and he tucked his chin lower as he returned the embrace. "The reverse is certainly true."

"I can see that, too." Jamiya released him and winked, and Ianto felt his cheeks burning.

Jack handed John Hart his vortex manipulator. "I just checked the calibration, and you're good to go. It's only got enough power for two jumps before it needs to recharge, so _no detours_. You take her straight home, you hear?"

Hart held up his hands in a display of innocence, which would have been more convincing had he not been trying to buckle the wrist strap on at the same time. "Easy, Jack. I have no intention of taking Jamiya anywhere _but _straight home. Much as I enjoy her company, she'd be a bit of a drag on the pleasure worlds of Rei'Shonn, if you know what I mean." He gave a saucy wink.

Jamiya ignored Hart and unfastened the universal translator she'd worn on her wrist ever since arriving. As she handed it back to Jack, she said something in the alien language that sounded so much like, and yet so different from, Jack's accent. She reached up to embrace her son, and Jack seemed to shrink within her arms, curling around her like a child. They stayed that way so long that Ianto felt his gaze was an intrusion and looked away.

At last they separated. "_Ti aro, Javic_," Jamiya said. Tears shone in her eyes

"_Ma ti aro a ni, matkal_," Jack answered, his voice tremulous. "_Ja dane_."

John Hart stepped up on the paving stone and waited until Jamiya had moved away from Jack before extending his own hand to him. "Square scrub?" he offered.

Jack eyed Hart's open palm with suspicion. "I still don't want you on my planet."

Hart seemed to consider this. "Deal," he said after a moment. "I take her home, mix the blue pack and quad clear. You dust up the red, should the JFCD ever poke their proboscides inside the far loop." He pushed his hand toward Jack again.

After a long pause, Jack slowly shook Hart's hand. "I see you in this quadrant again, deal's off. Full storm."

"You won't. Got better places to be." Hart snapped open the cover of his wrist strap and turned to Jamiya. "_Via goy ni?_"

Jamiya nodded and took his arm. With a wistful smile, she blew a kiss to Jack, then waved at Ianto and Gwen, who waved back.

"_Ciao bello_," Hart called to Jack with a wink. He shifted his gaze to Gwen and Ianto. "So long, Hot Lips. Good riddance, Eye Candy." He flashed a grin that was positively gleeful. "It's been a steal."

His finger touched a button on the vortex manipulator's control pad, and when the flash of blue-white light faded, the paving slab was empty.

No one moved or spoke. Ianto sneaked a glance at Jack, whose gaze was fixed in the place where his mother had last stood.

A minute passed. Gwen was the first to break the silence. "What's the JFCD?"

"Judoon Fiduciary Crimes Division," Jack said without looking away from the lift. "Space police. Well—more like Intergalactic Special Ops for hunting down swindlers."

"So… did we just agree not to turn him over to the authorities in order to guarantee your mother's safe conduct back home?"

Jack sighed, his distant stare finally breaking. "Not exactly. I agreed to cover his tracks in the eventuality of an investigation within this solar system, as compensation for his looking in on my mother from time to time over the past ten years, bringing her to visit me, and helping you two out while I was incapacitated. In consideration of the crimes he'd already committed here, he agreed not to come back to Earth. If he does, he knows I'll report him to the authorities."

Ianto raised an eyebrow. "That's a long list of very specific obligations to infer from a very few words."

"Trade lingo. When we worked together, we developed a super-efficient shorthand. Each of those words represents a set list of parameters." Ianto must have looked skeptical, because after glancing at him Jack added, "What? Oblique communication is a critical skill for con artists."

Gwen was frowning. "Since when do you speak con artist?"

Jack shook his head and looked off across the Plass. "I wasn't always one of the good guys, Gwen."

Gwen's eyes boggled at that revelation, but Ianto remembered the quiet confession Jack had made in his office the night before he'd fallen through the rift. He'd spoken then of running and hiding, of stealing, of being afraid. Ianto moved to Jack's side and touched his arm. "You ready to go home?" he asked quietly.

Jack tucked Ianto's hand into the crook of his elbow. "Yeah." They all squeezed onto the paving slab together, and Jack activated the lift with his wrist strap.

Gwen was still thoughtful as they rode the platform down into the Hub. "Do you think that's why he did all this?" she wondered aloud.

"What? Who?"

"John Hart." She turned to Jack. "Did he go through all this fuss and bring your mother here just to get you to forgive him?"

"I haven't forgiven him," Jack said firmly. "I just agreed to help him avoid being caught if the…" He trailed off and blinked a few times. "Wait. Why did he think they would be looking for him _here_?"

Gwen unconsciously echoed Jack's words. "What? Who?"

"Earth isn't part of any interplanetary banking system yet," Jack said. "That won't happen for close to a thousand years. Which means this solar system shouldn't even be on the JFCD's radar, unless they're tracking a specific criminal who's come here to hide from them." He frowned. "Unless he knows they're _already_ following him…"

"He is a time traveler," Ianto pointed out. "Maybe he's planning to come back to Earth in the future and commit a crime."

"But Jack told him the deal was off if he came here again," Gwen countered. "And he knows Jack will still be alive, no matter when he returns."

Jack shook his head as he stepped off the lift. "If he hadn't had my mother with him, I never would have let him stick around _this_ time. I was so distracted by her being here, I didn't think about what he might be up to."

"I did," Ianto put in. "I set the Hub's security monitors to activate lockdown if he tried to access any secure areas, but it never triggered."

"The archives?"

"He never went near them."

"I caught him in Jack's office once or twice," Gwen admitted. "He did drink most of your vintage liquor collection, Jack."

Jack looked pained. "Was anything else missing?"

"I checked the safe and the secure archives last night," said Ianto. "I didn't see anything out of place. And I made sure there was nothing important left on your desk once we let him out of the vaults."

Jack nodded. "I didn't have anything valuable out before I left. I mean, besides…" He trailed off, finger hovering over his wrist strap as though he'd been preparing to tap it.

Ianto followed Jack's gaze. "The wrist straps were hooked up to Jamiya's computer most of the time. She used them to track you."

"So Hart might have had access to them?"

"We know he did," Gwen said. "He's the one who dismantled them and helped her download the data."

"Was he ever _alone_ with them?"

Gwen and Ianto exchanged glances. "Once," Ianto said. "He took them downstairs, remember?"

Jack immediately unbuckled the strap and began to remove the device from the leather housing. "Find me a screwdriver. Slotted, two-millimeter."

Gwen rifled through the tools on the nearby workstation and held out a tiny screwdriver that Hart had used when he disassembled the wrist straps. "Is this the one?"

Jack slid the flat blade into a notch on the back plate of the vortex manipulator and delicately lifted a panel to reveal the electronics within. "Damn it!"

Gwen and Ianto moved closer to look at the device. "What? What's wrong?"

"That bastard stole my Specie chip."

"Is that important?" Gwen asked, brow furrowing. "Does it mean it won't work anymore, or…?"

"What? No, it's nothing to do with this thing." Jack snapped the panel back in place. "It's just where I was storing it, to keep it safe. But it means Captain John Hart now has the means to steal an _absurd_ amount of money."

Ianto's eyebrows shot up. "From you?"

"From anyone he wants to." Jack began putting his wrist strap to rights. "Specie is a cashless transfer system, meant to be a universal payment platform for interplanetary travelers. It's like using your credit card in a foreign country—it automatically charges you in the local currency, and then the bank converts it and debits the equivalent amount. There's a bit more to it than that, but that's the basic idea."

"So he essentially stole your bank card?"

"Not exactly. See, this particular Specie chip had been cracked. Instead of deducting the payment amount from the buyer's account, it used the deposit authorization code to access the seller's account and deposit a _negative_ payment. If the seller didn't have the appropriate security upgrade, it could drain their entire balance. And if you have the ability to travel in time, you can always guarantee that your mark doesn't have the latest security patch."

Gwen squinted at Jack. "And you had this thing… why, exactly?"

"Because there was a time in my life when I was on the run from a very powerful organization," Jack said frankly. "And sometimes, in order to survive, you have to do things you won't be proud of later."

Ianto put a sympathetic hand on Jack's shoulder. The muscles were knotted tight beneath the wool greatcoat. "And Hart knew you had this chip?"

"He gave it to me when I fled the Agency. He knew they would freeze my accounts, and I'd need the means to keep running." Jack gave a humorless laugh. "Probably the closest thing to a selfless act he's ever committed."

"Somewhat negated by the fact that he's just stolen it back," Ianto observed.

"Especially since the balance had been substantially increased by all the transfers I made back then. He used me to commit his larceny for him. Even if any victims are able to trace their money, the thefts can't be connected directly to him. They'd come after me first."

"Ah." Ianto made the connection. "That's why he thought the space police might come here."

Jack groaned. "You're right. Well, I've been lucky so far. Let's just hope the trail has gone very cold."

"At least I feel better knowing what Hart was up to," said Gwen. "I was beginning to fear he might actually have come for some more noble reason, like he said, and I'd have to stop hating him."

"That man has never had an altruistic thought in his life, no matter what he may claim." Jack sighed and buckled the wrist strap onto his arm again. "Well, at least he's out of our hair."

Ianto stared at him. "Are you really going to let him run off with the means of defrauding the whole galaxy?"

"Not much I can do about it. He neglected to fix my vortex manipulator, so I can't exactly go after him. Besides," Jack laughed, "we made a deal, which he hasn't technically violated. He rooked me good on it, I'll admit, but that's on me. I should have been more specific with my terms." He shrugged. "Anyway, it's hard to be too angry with him. He did bring my mother to see me."

"And he helped us out while you were gone," Gwen admitted reluctantly.

Jack nodded. "Besides, I know how he works. It's only a matter of time: He'll get cocky, and rob the wrong person, and the authorities will be on to him. Sooner or later he'll wind up in Stormcage."

"I don't know what Stormcage is, but let's hope it's sooner." Gwen yawned and looked at her watch. "Hey, Mr. Boss Man, can I go home? I'm knackered."

"Only if you promise never to call me 'Mr. Boss Man' again." Jack gave her a playful shove toward the door. "Shoo. Go see that guy you're married to."

"Already gone." Gwen collected her purse and coat from her desk. "See you both tomorrow."

When Gwen had departed, Ianto gazed around the interior of the Hub. "I guess we have the place to ourselves. Seems awfully quiet, after the past few weeks. Will take some getting used to."

Jack nodded. "I guess we could go someplace more lively this evening. Dinner?"

"Are you buying?"

Jack assumed a pathetic expression. "Ianto, I've just been robbed! And you're asking me to pay?"

Ianto crossed his arms. "I know what the crown pays you, Jack. Just as I know that your rent, utilities, vehicle maintenance, insurance, mobile phone service and a fair number of your meals are all covered by Torchwood. In fact, I'm not sure what you actually _do_ pay for out of your salary." He raised an eyebrow. "And that's without bringing up the question of taxes, and whether or not you pay any…"

Jack put his hands on Ianto's shoulders. "Fine, fine. I'll spring for dinner." He stole a kiss. "But you're responsible for dessert."

"Oh, I certainly have some ideas for afterward." Ianto smiled suggestively. "Though I think the particular, ah, _flavor_ of dessert may depend on where you take me for supper."

Jack's eyes narrowed. "You're a regular extortionist, you know that?"

Ianto flashed a wider grin. "It's the dishonest company I keep. To think, all this time you've been carrying the means for grand larceny around in that wrist strap of yours. Remind me never to trust you with my bank card."

Jack froze, his hands still resting lightly on Ianto's biceps. After a few seconds' pause, he tugged him in closer. "Hey. We're okay, aren't we?"

Ianto stared at him in surprise. "Of course we are. Why wouldn't we be?"

"What you said, about not trusting me…"

"I was only teasing, Jack. Of course I trust you."

"I just want to make sure things are all cleared up between us." Jack's fingers ran down Ianto's arms and wrapped around his hands. "I don't know what I'd do if they weren't, except try to fix it."

"There's nothing to fix." Ianto's brow furrowed. "Is there?" He took in Jack's anxious, drawn features and tightened his grip on Jack's fingers. "There is. What's wrong?"

"Nothing, really. This just suddenly reminded me of a conversation we had in my dream."

Ianto waited, but Jack didn't elaborate. "And?"

Jack sighed. "I don't know. I guess this whole mess—going through the rift, the dream, _everything—_has just reminded me how… uncertain things are. What's that quote? 'Tomorrow is promised to no man.'"

"All of life is uncertain, but it's no use fretting about it. If we only have one more day together before the rift swallows us up…" Ianto shrugged. "At least we have a day together. And I intend to make the most of each one."

"I just… I want to be sure I'm not leaving you in doubt about… well. Anything important."

It was clear how much Jack was struggling to express himself, and Ianto was reminded of how difficult he'd found it to broach the subject of their relationship in Jack's office the previous night. "Jack, there is no doubt in my mind where you're concerned," he assured him. "All this has made me realize some things, too."

Jack didn't entirely succeed in keeping the thread of anxiety out of his voice. "Such as?"

"To begin with…" Ianto knew the right moment had arrived at last, and the words came more easily than he'd imagined. "…that I love you."

Jack's eyes stretched impossibly wide and stayed that way, which was not the reaction Ianto had expected. When Jack remained silent, Ianto began feeling the tug of anxiety himself. "Are you shocked?" There was a hint of self-deprecation in his tone.

Jack shook his head. "Relieved," he answered when he'd remembered how to blink. "I was afraid it was just me. I wasn't sure how to bring it up."

Ianto laughed gently, the knot in his chest releasing. "That makes two of us. I was worried it might make you uncomfortable if I said anything."

"I'm glad you did. You don't know how much I needed to hear it." Jack looked down at their joined hands. "And… I know there are things you need to hear from me. I know I haven't been very clear about where we stand, but I want you to know that I'm here to stay. I won't disappear on you like before, and if something takes me away again…"

"I know, Jack. I trust you'll always find a way back to me." Ianto held his eyes. "And I'll be waiting when you do."

Jack's face flooded with relief. He surged forward to kiss Ianto, and continued holding him close when they parted. "You know, you're a lot more confident than my subconscious gave you credit for."

Ianto raised an eyebrow. "I'm not sure how I should take that."

"It was meant as a compliment."

"Fair enough." Ianto kissed him again. "So we're good, yes?"

"Yes. We're good."

"And we can go to dinner now?"

Jack laughed. "Sure. Any place you like. Do you have a preference?"

"I can go anywhere," Ianto said, holding tightly to Jack, "as long as it's with you."

* * *

_A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality._

\- Yoko Ono

* * *

**A/N:** This story was two years in the writing, and I've quite enjoyed the comments and reactions from all my lovely readers. Thank you for following along!


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